Medsider: Learn from Medtech and Healthtech Founders and CEOs - De-Risking Your Way to a Successful Fundraise: Interview with WearLinq CEO Konrad Morzkowski

Episode Date: September 4, 2024

In this episode of Medsider Radio, we sat down with Konrad Morzkowski, co-founder and CEO of WearLinq. The startup is commercializing eWave, an FDA-cleared EKG monitor for continuous cardiac monitoring. Konrad is an engineer from Sweden and a member of Forbes’ 30 under 30 list. After obtaining an MS at Stanford – where he met his co-founders and raised his first round – Konrad dove right into entrepreneurship with WearLinq, a company commercializing consumer-facing digital healthcare solutions with an initial focus on EKG monitoring. In this interview, Konrad shares how he optimizes fundraising efforts by aligning them with important milestones, his unconventional methods to gather voice of customer research, and how his startup moved rapidly through product design iterations. 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 a curated investor database to 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 VI. 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 Konrad Morzkowski.

I think fundraising is primarily about storytelling and just being able to understand how we see is valued opportunities, which is, in my opinion, mostly related to risk for us in healthcare, and especially if it's med device, you have regulatory risk with the FDA, you have risk with hardware development and supply chain and everything that comes with that, and then potentially even reimbursement and how to get paid. And I think our job is to basically remove risk and show that we're able to overcome these two investors to be able to raise the funding and try to structure this around achieving milestones. 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 Conner and Roskowski, an industrial engineer originally from Sweden. After obtaining a master's at Stanford where he met his co-founders and raised his first round, Conrad dove right into entrepreneurship. Today, he's the CEO of Warelink, a company commercializing digital healthcare solutions with an initial focus on EKG monitoring.

Here for you the key things that we discussed in this conversation. First, plan your fundraising efforts around achieving significant milestones, such as getting FDA clearance that reduce risk, unlock new sets of investors, and increase your startup's fundability. Second, don't try to understand everything on your own. Reach out, whether it's to experts who have navigated similar patterns. or to investors who have experience in your domain. Asking for help is a good trait, but be mindful when evaluating the advice you get. Third, it's important to move through the product design phase swiftly to demonstrate value to

stakeholders and minimize your cash burn before getting to the next milestone. Utilize available resources such as incubators, but don't hesitate to use unconventional methods like recruiting trial subjects through Craigslist as an example. Before we jump into this episode, I wanted to let you know that the latest edition of MedSider Mentors is now live. We just published volume six, which summarizes the key learnings from the most popular interviews over the last several months with incredible entrepreneurs like Dan Rose, former CEO of Limflow, Dr. Stephen Michelson, founder of Ferapulse, and current CEO of field medical and other leaders of some of the hottest startups in the space. Look, it's tough to listen or read every Medsider interview that comes out, even the best ones. But there are so many valuable lessons you can pick up from the founders and CEOs that join our program.

So that's why we decided to create MedSider mentors. It's the easiest way for you to learn from the world's best medical device and health. technology entrepreneurs in one central place. To check out the latest volume, head over to medsiderradio.com forward slash mentors. Premium members get free access to all past and future volumes. And if you're not a premium member yet, you should definitely consider signing up. In addition to every volume of MedSider mentors, you'll get full access to the entire library of interviews dating back to 2010.

You'll also be able to see all of our playbooks, which are thematically handpicked collections of the most insightful interviews covering topics like capital fundraising, early stage development, regulatory challenges, reimbursement, M&A, and much more. And last, considering that fundraising could be one of the most daunting tasks for any startup, we curated a database of over 700 VC funds, private equity firms, angel groups, and more, all eager to invest in medical device and health technology startups. Access to this database is a premium member exclusive, so don't miss out. Learn more about MedSider Mentors and our premium memberships by visiting MedsiderRadio.com

forward slash mentors. All right, without further ado, let's jump right into the interview. Conrad, welcome to MedSatter Radio. I appreciate you coming on. Yeah, thank you so much for having. And as I mentioned to you right before, his first podcast, so excited to give this a shot. Yeah, no, I like it.

It's going to be fun to learn a little bit more about your backgrounds, as well as what you're building with the EWave and Wehrlink more broadly. With that said, I recorded a very brief bio at the outset of this episode. But I always like to start here. If you can give us like a two, three-minute elevator pitch, like where you've been leading up to co-founding the company running in the CEO, that'd be great. Yeah, definitely. I think it's going to be pretty short compared to your other guests. So I am originally from Sweden. I did undergrad in Sweden, industrial engineering, graduate school at Stanford and master's in management science and engineering, but mostly focus on computer science and both. But my co-founder at Stanford, and we actually got our first funding while still in school. So we literally transitioned from school to this full time, also during COVID, like middle of lockdown. So it was very interesting time. Pretty smooth transition. So literally from school to this. Awesome. You check the box in kind of two areas that I'm always intrigued by is one,

young founders, right? I always love highlighting stories of like young founders or co-founders in the metex space because it's not too uncommon to do the capital intensive nature of building companies in this arena. And then two, your device is designed for, has a bit more of a consumer type of flare. I think there's a lot of a lot of insights that we can, that those of us that kind of grew up in more pure play medical device can kind of pull into whatever we're doing. With that said, talk to us a little bit about E-Wave, how the idea came to be. Is there a background store and why you're interested in the space during your time at Stanford and even maybe even leading up to it? And then also, if you can, maybe briefly touch on it how it's different from other, I'm

going to say similar, but maybe correct me if I'm wrong, but other kind of similar devices in the space, a live core's cardio family too. Yeah, definitely. So the EWAid is a cardiac monitor. It records your heart activity continuously with an EKG. And we're initially using this for arrhythmia diagnosis. And just briefly on arrhythmia. it can lead to stroke, among other things. Also, most commonly leads to heart failure. I have had a few family members that had suffered strokes, but that was not the reason I started this.

Like, when I came to the U.S., I didn't even know about this correlation. I was just more broadly excited about building in AI for healthcare. And so I actually wrote about this when I was applying to school, and my first week I met my co-founder. His name is Eushin. He was at the time a PhD student in bioengineering. we started working together. I saw the people that helped us along the way,

but another one became a co-founder, Albert Rogers, who was an electrophysiologist at Stanford. So answered any kind of questions I would have about arithmetic, my cardiology and then helped me get up to speed. As mentioned, we got our first funding while we were still in school. So that's briefly about that. Got it, got it. And when people think of a wearable for measuring EKGs

and maybe other biomarkers in general, they'll think of Apple Watch. Maybe if they'll like they're a little bit further in the weeds, they'll think of a life core, what I mentioned earlier. So how, if I'm you thinking about founding that you're starting a company, I think most people that listen to this program understand how difficult it is to build a company in healthcare. So why tackle this? How is it distinctly different than some of those other products I mentioned? Yeah, definitely. So there's like consumer type of solution, still medical devices, but consumer solutions like the Apple Watch or a Lyprus Cardia,

which can give you an EKG pretty much immediately, but a temporary EKG. Right. So like when you put two fingers on that device, you get an EKG. or with the cardio, right, like you put it to your leg to get a multi-channel EKG. But they're all temporary. And then you have another set of, like, very medical solutions that are continuous EKG recorders. Started a long time ago with like Holter monitors, but then move towards patches at the industry progressed to extend how long someone can wear it and actually provide

a continuous signal. Do you capture events that may not be symptomatic and gives really doctors a much better basis to diagnose everything else? But the problem with those that they're not as accessible, right? you said, like a consumer solution, like a LiveCore or the Apple Watch, the continuous record is generally require a prescription, but they would last by one to two weeks on you and then taken back by the company. And so what we are doing is trying to make these devices a bit more consumer friendly, but also provide great cell and quality. So you've made a device that is wireless,

multiple channels, and for continuous recorders, that's generally only seen with wired monitors. It's smaller, it's lighter, but also provides this great quality while recording it's multiple channels, right? There was a whole thing or a lot of core releasing a multi-channel, like a six-lead EKG, and that's the same idea behind ours. Got it, got it. So is it fair to say, I'm not super into the weeds into like this sort of specific category, but is it fair to say that you've taken basically what is a legacy of filter monitor improved upon that in pretty significant ways and made it as easy to use as some of those more consumer-centric kind of EKG wearables? Is that kind of a fair summary?

Yeah, I think that's very fair. Got it, got it, cool. And then for everyone listening, WhereLink is the company, right? We'll link to it in the full write-up on MedSider as we usually do, but it's W-E-A-R-L-I-N-Q-C-com. Yes, link with the Q.com. You can learn a little bit more about the company as well as E-Wave, the product that we'll talk about throughout the course of this particular episode. We'll also link to Conrad as LinkedIn profiles.

You can check out his background and reach out to him or connect with him as well. Before we go back in time or step inside the old Med-Sider time machine, as I like to call it, Conrad, give us a sense where the company is at today, knowing that we'll reporting, call it mid-20204. Yeah. So we have received FDA clearance for this system, end of year 2022. We most recently did an acquisition of AMI cardiac to increase access to our device, and we're very much commercial in the market and selling.

Okay, got it. It's a commercial stage. Okay, very cool. I don't think I fully realize that in the background research, kind of leading up to this. So that's great. And hopefully we'll have a chance to dig into that recent acquisition of AMI as well, because that's also very unique to have an earlier, I would say, even though you're commercial, like earlier stage startup, like Whirling. So with that said, I want to start,

start by going back in time and learning a little bit more about not only your journey, but also how you've gone about to building Weirland over the past handful of years. And first question on the docket is, is somewhat circling back around to this idea that your first-time founder, a young CEO, etc. You haven't land on the Forbes 30, under 30 list this year, I think. So congrats on that. But for those listening that have an entrepreneurial spirit, that see what you've built. And what you've built. And want to take a swing at the plate, but maybe haven't. What do you think?

When you think about kind of what you learned over the past handful of years building Weir Link, like what are there a few things that stand out that you think founders and CEOs really need to get right or alternatively what typically has tripped up founders that are either in your network or that things that have tripped up specifically and building WareLink up to this point. Thank you. Yeah, definitely. I'll do my best.

And I think more things are going to come up as we talk. But I think broadly as a first time founder, there's a lot of struggles of fundraising. and just operating healthcare just make that more difficult with the FDA, reimbursement, and things like that. But I think fundraising is primarily about storytelling and just being able to understand how VC's a valued opportunities, which is, in my opinion, most related to risk. And so that's why seemingly all VCs love B2B SaaS because you have to prove that this team can build something that the market will buy. But obviously for us in healthcare, especially if it's med device, you have regulatory risk

with the FDA, you have risk with hardware development and supply chain and everything that comes with that, and then potentially even reimbursement and how to get paid. And so I think that limits how many BCs will talk to you, but I think they're also very good roadblocks or like defensibility that you build out as you go through these obstacles and pass them hopefully. And I think our job is to basically remove risk and show that we're able to overcome these two investors to be able to raise the funding and try to structure this around achieving milestones, right? Because as you de-risk, you're becoming more fundable. I think one example for us that was very much showing this was obviously as a first-time founder

trying to tell VCs that we need X to achieve FDA clearance does not sound very believable. But there's definitely someone that has done this that can help you with this. And so it becomes more convincing when it comes from an expert. We eventually got help from two regulatory experts that literally had been through the process, got some of our predicate devices and similar devices. FDA clearances, they came on and helped us guide us through the process that he told us exactly what we need to do, but more broadly even invested in us. And so I think the more proof we can do showing that third parties believe in this and

are guiding you, the more believable your story than sounds to investors. And so I think this is also broadly very helpful where there's always someone that probably has gone through it and just like finding those people and getting their help to get you to where you need to be. And getting these RICOAWRADSRDVISR really helped us go efficiently through the FDA. And we achieved clearance in 2022 a bit over two years since we went full time. Got it. Yeah.

That's not how I would have expected you to answer that question. It's obviously a sharp guy undergrad and industrial engineering, masters from Stanford, et cetera. And you calling out the one thing that most, what is most founders get tripped on, it's just a general lack of understanding of how to raise capital. And I think the reason I want to reemphasize. what you just mentioned is that's so crucial. You and I sound like a fair number of people in your network is the same as me

that are either building companies or are earlier in this process. And that's something that like you're almost undoubtedly going to need to raise capital building a healthcare company, especially if it's like a hardware medical device. And if you don't understand not really who to talk to at certain stages, what it comes to fundraising, but also what they're looking for, how they evaluate opportunities. That's so crucial. I'm glad you touched on that at the very outset because it would be easy. I would think it would be easy for someone like you,

to go straight to like, how do I best understand the clinical pathway? How do I best understand regulatory? And obviously you did do that. But in addition to that, it sounds like you went deep on trying to really understand. What are BCs? What are they really looking for? And how are they underwriting the risk associated with what I'm, the story I'm trying to tell? Yeah, I think getting that fundraising around gives you the license to keep going and like go and create all the other stuff you were talking about, which is the regulatory proof, the commercial proof and everything else that comes with that. Yeah. Yeah. So let's touch on, let's touch on kind of early stage development a little because this is this, I'm especially curious to get your kind of take on this, considering your

engineering background, both from an industrial design perspective, as well as just the inherent kind of complexity of building a device like yours, right? That's got to be consumer-friendly enough, but you're also tackling kind of arrhythmias and signals is not the most, it's not for the fainter part either. So when you think about what you've learned over the past handful of years, building Warelink, are there a couple pieces of advice that you can maybe offer up to other founders or CEOs that are in the earlier stages of iterating on their idea, their concept, typically probably with fairly limited capital, right? So they need to get all the squeeze they can out of the,

all the juice they can out of the squeeze of the lemon. Yeah. So I think for us, things that helped was to split responsibilities as much as possible and have a founder team that, like, understands and can deliver on a MVP ideally, where I would be responsible for the software, I usually my co-founder for the hardware and supply chain and everything they came with that. And then our third co-founder, AG, on the clinical side.

and making sure we create some that's clinically valuable. And even from the beginning, we actually had, for example, Yushin, he is now in Singapore, and we have our manufacturing Southeast Asia, so he's locally going to get stuck done. I was able to do software, but then even as we scaled, I think it's important. I think we made some mistakes here, but it's important to find, again, the one person that can help you. Like, just be very thoughtful about recruiting and getting the right people on board and not just rely on big shops that can promise everything. and then sometimes not deliver the best results.

So there you're making sure you get the right person to work on your thing. For us, some other things that were helpful is just always find what the bottleneck is and just attack that. When it comes to developing hardware that is regulated, it would be about locking down design of hardware as soon as possible, and then maybe create the other things surrounding so that we can parallel path things and just basically move faster towards that clearance because the hardware needs to go through safety testing, usability testing,

a lot of things like that. I think a few more things that I can think of is just take advantage of whatever resources you have. We were super lucky to be at Stanford. That is great for this because there's resources, there's a thing called Venture Studio that helps founders connects you to people and Star DECs. What this was helpful to me is just getting a network

as someone that literally knew basically no one when I came to the U.S. just get people that have been through this to ask them questions, kind of what you're doing with the podcast, right? People have been through this, you can add them questions, and then they will tell you, and you just learn from other people. That way it makes you much more efficient. Things that we weren't able to do that would have been helpful is like SBIR grants,

right? Like we have ownership by two people that are not yet American citizens, and so we could not get the ownership requirements, but SBIRs are obviously very helpful. And then sometimes I think we just don't hustle. There's a lot of just like getting things done yourself. I've gone to try to recruit people to our study to a health system here in SF. And really with no good response, I've just really wanted this kid doing here.

But then we've also done like Craigslist to recruit people with Amazon gift cards and that worked super well. So just try to find whatever solution to deal with the bottleneck as fast as possible. Yeah. It's one of the reasons I love like having younger entrepreneurs like on the program to see you're not afraid to think creatively about certain kind of initiatives, if you will, or functions. that maybe others that have been around for 20, 30 years and device wouldn't even consider. So as an example, you mentioned right out of the gate, Singapore, manufacturing in Singapore. Most people would be like, no way. I'm not like, I'm not moving a line or setting up a line, OUS until it gets to a certain phase,

development phase, or maybe even like post certain unit units that are built in a commercial capacity. And so the fact that you're like, no, we can, we have enough connections or we know what we're doing, enough to go to explore manufacturing in Singapore right out of the gate, I think is pretty, pretty cool. But it kind of speaks to just, look, building startups are hard, or even harder, I would argue, in the device or like any sort of regular environment. You've got to be willing to like take swings like that. Where others might say, no way, you shouldn't ever consider that. And you're like, no, it seems like it makes a lot of sense.

We're at least going to pursue it. You know what I mean? Yeah, I think a lot of what I've also learned is if it makes sense. I think one of the big jobs of a founder too is filtering advice. And there's people that are going to tell you what to do and it's your job to figure out. what of that is true and what is not and just really try to find a solution that is the best possible. Yeah, it's a great way to sum it up. Just being able to filter advice.

And don't get me wrong. Like my, I guess my sort of, I guess response to your answer is I love the fact that you're leaning in and taking more creative approaches. That doesn't mean that you don't take advice from more seasoned folks. But also, to your point, if it makes sense, like, why not? You know what I mean? Just because it's maybe hasn't been done in a traditional way, it doesn't mean that you don't consider it or don't like at least give it a fair shake. Yeah.

So with that said, I guess it's more of a secondary question of this engineering topic, which is really more around the consumer aspect, right? You have a background in industrial design. I think this is not necessarily, the question is not necessarily specific to consumers per se, because I do think in general, even if you're building a product for a physician and user or a tech or a nurse, you need to be thinking about these same thing. So when you have evaluated how this could be used in the home as an example, Eway specifically, Are there things that either surfaced throughout that exercise or maybe just at a high level,

things that you really think other founders' videos need to get right when it comes to kind of design or the user experience around a device? Yeah. So the way I think we thought about product design is first just find out what is out there and just see what people have to say about that. What this specifically looked like for us was going to Facebook support groups for Withmia and seeing what people had to say about existing devices and what they complain about, what they liked and then trying to build a solution based on that.

And then I think it's just continuous iteration. And like trying to find even simple, elegant solutions in other places. We have magnets that we use for part of our device, similar to how we have a MagSafe on an Apple product, which makes a very simple attachment mechanism. And there's things like that where we try to just continuously iterate until we have something that we think is a great design, but also reliable. For home care specifically, I think our big advantage is we have a connected

device. And so we we know where the patient is in a process, always and can guide them and help them get through the remaining of the process and troubleshoot if needed. I think the FDA is also very good at this now where they require human factors testing. And so we need to test that our solution can be used by the intended user, which in many cases, the patients are at. Got it. A couple of things that stand out hearing you riff on this topic a little bit is, one, stealing from other industries, right? Like everyone understands how an AXAF product not everyone. Most people understand how it makes. I probably work. So they really like it. It's compelling and being able to incorporate that into your device. But also just like you mentioned

Facebook support groups, right? Another kind of story that has come up in other kind of entrepreneurial circles that I run into is if you have a product that maybe is lends itself well to consumers, looking at like other maybe similar, and I am using air quotes for it, similar type of products, even on Amazon, right? And being able to easily sort through what are the most common things that come up in all of these negative reviews. You can typically, like, get a decent, run a decent sort of BOC exercise really in like probably half a day, just doing something like that. So there's a lot of creative, creative ways to evaluate the landscape before you go too far down the design path. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Cool. Let's shift a little bit to fundraising, right? You mentioned this already

at the outside of the discussion here, but you guys recently completed a capital raise springtime, I think, as your lead investor for over $6 million. That's no easy, raising capital is no easy feed, especially when you get up into the kind of the higher single digit kind of range. And so when you think, when you think of just about either your fundraising journey or just things in particular that challenges that you got to overcome, are there a couple things that really come to mind? Or, you know, alternatively, are the things that you would do differently if you had to go out and start the process today versus maybe a year ago? Hey there, it's Scott. And thanks for listening in so far.

The rest of this conversation is only available via our private podcast for MedSider Premium members. If you're not a premium member yet, you should definitely consider signing up. You'll get full access to the entire library of interviews dating back to 2010. This includes conversations with experts like Renee Ryan, CEO of Cala Health, Nadim Yared, CEO of CVRX, and so many others. As a premium member, you'll get to join live interviews with these incredible medical device and health technology entrepreneurs. In addition, you'll get a copy of every volume of Medsider mentors at no additional cost. To learn more, head over to MedsiderRadio.com forward slash premium.

Again, that's Medsiderradio.com forward slash premium.