Medsider: Learn from Medtech and Healthtech Founders and CEOs - Designing Consumer-Facing Medical Technology: Interview with Indomo CEO Rick Bente

Episode Date: February 24, 2026

In this episode of Medsider Radio, we sat down with Rick Bente, co-founder and CEO of Indomo.Indomo’s flagship device, ClearPen, is an investigational at-home corticosteroid injection designed to treat inflammatory acne.Rick has over 20 years of experience as an engineer and operator across medtech and pharma, with leadership roles at Medtronic, Insulet, and YourBio, focused on drug delivery and combination products. He is an inventor on more than 50 patents and has generated over $150 million in investments.In this conversation, Rick discusses how Indomo translated an in-office dermatology procedure into at-home care, why usability had to be engineered rather than trained, how the company decided when to exit stealth mode, and how proof-based milestones shaped its fundraising.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 Rick Bente.

I'm a really firm believer in sort of this principle that it's the engineer's job to solve all the hard problems for the user. And you've got to design products that are both easy to use and also really difficult to misuse. And so we did spend a lot of time with patients and human factors types of the studies to really understand what it was that was going to make this product really simple for patients to use and ultimately effective. And then we also worked with some early physicians in the space to understand exactly how physicians are performing these actions and so that we could better sort of mimic exactly what's happening in a dermatologist's office, you know, directly in the device and the hands of a patient. 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, I sat down with Rick Bentee, co-founder and CEO of Endomo, a therapeutics company developing at-home prescription dermatology treatments. Rick brings more than 20 years of experience as an engineer and operator across medtech, pharma, and diagnostics, and has held leadership roles at Medtronic, Insulate, Unilife, and Your BioHealth with a focus on drug delivery and combination products. He's an inventor on more than 50 patents and has helped raise over $150 million. Here are a few topics we explored in this conversation. First, how do you translate an in-office procedure out of the clinic? Second, how do you build consumer-facing medical technology that works without user training or supervision?

Third, what needs to be proven before a company is ready to develop a public narrative? And last, what proof points need to be reached before you're ready to be. raise your next round. Before we dive into the full episode, I think you'll want to check out MedSider courses. These new eight-week courses are designed to help you learn winning formulas from world-class CEOs. Medsider courses cover topics like fundraising, device design and development, clinical and regulatory strategy, commercialization, and M&A. Each course covers hard-earned lessons shared by the MedTech founders and CEOs who join our program. Medsider courses can be purchased individually or they're included at no additional cost with the MedSider All-Axcess Pass.

You can explore Medsider courses at Medsider.com forward slash courses. Again, that's Medsider.com forward slash courses. All right, without further ado, let's dive into the interview. All right, Rick, welcome to Medsider Radio. Appreciate you coming on. Yeah, thanks so much, Scott. Thanks for having me. Now that our voices are fully recovered,

the last interview kind of summary that I recorded for the most recent podcast that we released, my voice was still very much recovering. And I'm like, now's the time to like start doing some, looking at some of these AI voice. tools because like if I my voice is gone for like a week or two weeks it's like it's hard to and everything else is delayed but anyway you sound good a long way for sure you sound good sounds like it was a semi-decent week coming out of jpm so i'm looking forward to yeah learning a

little bit more mostly recovered now by uh by by tuesday here yeah well cool so i recorded a very abbreviated you know bio at the outset of this this episode but let's start there i mean you've got like a two-decade-plus career now, kind of spanning, you know, med tech, biotech, et cetera, before endomo. So give us like a one to two-minute overview, right, of kind of your background in, you know, from your, from your perspective. I'm an engineer by training in background. I started in the diabetes space at Medtronic, working on some of their first and now existing still insulin pump platforms, figuring out ways to improve the way people with diabetes were able to get access to insulin and overall just improve their care, find ways to connect with sensors better,

and ultimately with the vision of unlocking kind of an artificial pancreas. And so that was the place where I kind of cut my teeth in the med tech space and learned a lot about the systems and what's required. And then I spent another six years after that in the more startup drug delivery space, building parental drug delivery solutions for large volume monoconol antibodies for large cap pharma and learned a lot about what it takes to deal with pharma to be a pharma company combination products and all of the things that go into that process and then spent a little bit of time back in diabetes but got the entrepreneurial bug here almost a decade ago now and then spent a couple years running a company here in

Boston that's called your biohealth shout out to that team they just got acquired by him's and hers about a month and a half ago or so now. So it's amazing to see that technology live on and move really into a business that is very consumer focused and thinking really hard about how to open up access. And from there, I started in DOMO with my co-founder, Jack Abraham, who was also a co-founder at Hems and Hers. And that was really focused, again, on finding ways to bring therapies out of the office, into patients' homes, into patients' hands,

and really empower them to take more control over their own treatments. And that's probably been the biggest theme in my MedTech-Slas-Farma diagnostics journey is really just finding ways to use technology to unlock access for patients and really find ways to empower them to kind of take more control over their own health. Very cool. Yeah, and now that you mentioned that your bio was required by Hems and Hers, I do remember see that headline. I'm like, yeah, that's right.

I kind of forgot about that. It seems like there's going to be fascinating to see, you know, which diagnostics they start to launch with. Yeah. Yeah, it's very, very cool to see, see technology that you developed, you know, just continue to grow and expand in its applications. We'll get on to endomo here in a second. But do you recall, I think it was when Hymns first launched, it was like,

there's like 18 or 19, 2018, 19 timeframe. And they just, like, their revenue numbers out of the gate were just wild, wild. Yeah. Unbelievable growth in a space that, you know, I think if you were to ask people at the time, there was not a lot of confidence that people were going to be willing to work with telehealth providers, cash pay for pharmaceuticals that, you know, presumably they could get from their physician. And I think there's no question. And flip the model on its head and convince the world that people are demanding better access, simpler access, cheaper access. Cheaper access.

in a lot of cases to the types of therapies that they know they can get. And telehealth is going to be a major piece of that going forward. Yeah, I mean, you see all the players now and right, everyone sees like the commercials for Roe and obviously hymns, et cetera. It's like it feels like they, oh yeah, of course this has been around for for a while, right? But like back in that time period, you're exactly right. Yeah, I mean, it's like a lot of tons of skepticism. It was interesting. At that point of time, I hadn't started fast wave yet. I was still, I was still working on Juve. And we had seen it firsthand where we had commercialized this class two device in a brand new category, obviously did not hit the same revenue numbers as Hymns did. I mean, it's hard to match that. I mean, I thought we did pretty well, but they, I think, blew almost everyone out of the water. But I saw it firsthand, right, like this burgeoning, this burgeoning trend from patients, well, let's just say consumers, patients, however you want to describe them, one and the same, that they are absolutely willing to pay cash, right? And not, not $50 cash, right? I mean, We're talking hundreds, if not thousands.

I mean, our AOV at Juve for, gosh, I think over the course of like two or three years at least was like $13,400. So people were like absolutely willing to pay cash. If they had confidence, right, that something would work, a therapy. It's a real solution to a real problem. People absolutely will do what it takes to get access. I mean, look at how GLP ones have flipped the pharma model on its head. And they're now going direct to consumer themselves and finding a whole bunch of new ways to distribute.

I think it's changed fundamentally how you can start to think about pricing and for really consumer-facing devices. There are a lot of new opportunities and business models to explore. 100%. Yeah. So let's use that as a transition point to the clear pin, right? Tell us a little bit more. For those that haven't jumped on the site and know nothing about what you're building, what's the clear pin? What meaningful, like, you know, clinical solution, right, are you solving for? Yeah, so when DOMO developed clear pen really to provide patients with an opportunity to access the same treatment that they get in a dermatologist's office at home. And our first indication is for inflammatory acne. So if you go to a dermatologist today with inflammatory acne, dermatologists will make small

micro injections of corticosteroid sort of directly into that acne lesion or pimple. And because corticosteroids do an amazing job at reducing inflammation. It can reduce the symptoms of those lesions very, very quickly, you know, sometimes sub 24 hours. So it's a really unbelievable treatment. The challenge is it's really only accessible in dermatologist offices. And in addition to that, it's something that you need right away. So it's not something you can schedule months in advance. And if you call your derm today, you're standing in line for a month to three plus months or more, depending on where you're located in the country. And so what ClearPen does is it basically allows a patient to self-inject a very controlled dose

of corticosteroid directly into that intradermal space, and it controls very carefully the depth of that injection, the volume of that injection, and the rate of that injection. Okay, got it. I love these business models where something that is proven, right, but hard to access, right? In this situation, you've got to, you know, schedule an appointment that's usually, usually, you know, what, 60, 90, 120 days out and for something that's much, much more urgent, much more immediate, right? So I love these, I love these business models. And if you're listening to this and don't get to the full write-up on MedSider, the website is I-N-D-O-M-O-T-X.com.

So endomot-T-X.com. We'll link to it, of course, in the full write-up on Medsider, but just wanted to get that out there now in case you don't happen to get, if listening is the only way that you kind of consume this type of content. So with that said, give us a sense for kind of where the company is at. We're recording this in very early, you know, 2026. Are you full on commercialization? Like, where are you at from a life cycle perspective? We're clinical stage. So we'll be going into our phase two trials this year, delivering that interim data sort of at the tail end of this calendar year. And based on that data, we'll then move into our pivotal trials prior to NBA submission. So we're still preclearance.

You know, we're in development, but we have built the clear pen. we've developed the drug and we're just now in the process of rolling out the clinical trial itself. Got it. And phase two and phase three trials for a product like this, what are they, in terms of like participants or subjects? Phase two is, you know, typically in an application like this, somewhere between 100 and 200 patients or so, you know, phase three tends to be more like 500 to 1,000, often split across to different pivotal trial, so sort of a phase three A and B or one and two, depending on what you want to call it. Got it, got it. And that's really just based on FDA's guidance and the feedback that, you know,

we've had from them as well as, you know, what they provide in sort of guidance documents. Okay. And I would assume for something like acne enrolling in a trial, though, even though it may be 500 patients in a phase three, like seems like a lot of patients, relatively speaking, but you could probably enroll quite quickly, I would imagine, right, for something like this? Yeah, that's one of, one of the things we're really excited about, you know, you have 20 million patients in the U.S. who have inflammatory acne, and a million of them or so are regularly getting these types of injections in dermatologist offices. And based on that, yes, we have not struggled to recruit patients. We've run a preclinical feasibility study in the past, and the recruitment process was actually

quite smooth. One of the nice things about dealing with indications where the patient population is large, it's much simpler to recruit larger numbers of patients pretty quickly. Yeah, got it. Cool. All of that makes sense. I think that's a helpful backdrop kind of for the next, you know, kind of 20, 30 minutes of this conversation. We'll go back in time and learn a little bit more about, you know, your journey building in Delmo over the past. Gosh, it's what? We're going on five years now, I think, right? Four years, basically. Four years? Yeah, yeah. So, and you're at obviously a pretty crucial point, right? I mean, it's difficult for any startup, right, to get to this to get, in your case, to a phase two trial, you know, or maybe pure play device to get to

even a feasibility study. So there's not a lot of, a lot of folks that make it this far. So curious to get your learnings, right, having built the company over the past handful of years now. So with that said, let's circle back around to kind of those early days, right, called 2000, 21, 22 time frame, still pretty far off from getting it into patients, trying to move, you know, quickly with a, you know, a fairly limited amount of capital. When you think about kind of that early stage, development work, you know, what are a few things that either you've learned personally or that you maybe often recommend, right, to other entrepreneurs around how to how to best deal with that constant balance of trying to get to the next phase of our next inflection point from a

development standpoint, but oftentimes with not a lot of capital. Yeah, I think there are really sort of two key key points that kind of guided us in those early days. You know, one was fail fast. So we wanted to prove out the hardest, most challenging technical problems first generate as much data as we could to support those so that we knew what the overall scope of what we had to do was going to look like. And the other piece was working with advisors and investors and other entrepreneurs to really identify where those value inflections are in that sort of commercialization journey so that you can map out pretty carefully what capital. you need to achieve what milestones. And then based on that, you can go out and sell to investors. This is what we're going to do. This is what we're going to achieve. And by achieving that, we've generated real value inflection points for the business and, you know, in a venture back company, right? You're raising additional capital on the basis of each of those milestones and creating an opportunity

for people to gain value throughout that entire process. Yeah. On that note, and we'll maybe talk a little bit later on the conversation. about fundraising specifically, but that framing, right, of this is the amount of money that I'm going to raise to achieve these milestones and that's going to lead to, you know, a 2x or a 3x or a 4x in value, even though that sounds relatively simple us talking about it, it's not like to communicate that in a very succinct way, right? It makes so much difference, you know, when you're in those early stages, right? And I don't know, it's something that I think is worthy of of emphasizing, right? That just the ability to kind of nail that messaging and have that,

have that kind of very thoughtful talk track speaks volumes of those, those earliest points in the company. Yeah, it makes it, it makes a really big difference in your ability to raise capital throughout, throughout the process. Yeah, yeah, especially as you're thinking about not just maybe a seed round or a series A, but what does then the series B look like, right? Because every investor that's coming into those early rounds are going to be thinking about their investment and what that looks like in those later rounds, right? How much are they going to be diluted, you know, et cetera, to eventually see a return on their on their capital. So with that said, though, let's talk a little bit about some of the design decisions that went into the clear pan,

especially considering kind of the consumer aspect of this, right? And I think, I think even though this question is maybe a little bit more consumer-centric, it applies, in my opinion, even if you're selling a device or something that's used by a physician, right, thinking, putting yourself basically in the shoes of the end user and how they're how they're thinking, through workflow and how they'd use something. Give us a sense for kind of how your team, you know, thought, thought through that in those, in those early years, kind of eventually leading up to getting, getting into clinical studies. I'm a really firm believer in sort of this principle that it's the engineer's job to,

to solve all the hard problems for the user. And you've got to design products that are both easy to use and also really difficult to misuse. And so we did spend a lot of time, you know, with patients and human factors types of the studies to really understand what it was that was going to make this product really simple for patients to use and ultimately effective. And then we also worked with some early physicians in the space to understand exactly how physicians are performing these actions and so that we could better sort of mimic exactly what's happening in a dermatologist's office, you know, directly in the device and the hands of a patient. Having sort of both of those inputs,

early and then just saying, even though it might be simpler from a technical standpoint to offload a step to the user or rely on the user to perform something, check something, I think one of the key sort of guiding principles in this product was, let's take as many of those things off the table. I would rather make sure we understand from an engineering standpoint how to solve for that complexity in a controlled environment, you know, manufacturing, in the design space, you know, as opposed to trying to say, let's put this in the hands of an inexperienced user and hope that they can do this correctly.

Hope's not a great strategy when it comes to usability. Yeah, no doubt. That comment you made about designing something so it's not misused, right? I don't want to gloss over that because I think it's so critical because I think all of us tend to lean, when we're thinking about like a new design, right, or a new device, new product, et cetera, like, how do we want to improve upon a legacy product or legacy something, right? And what new features or what improvements we want to make?

But we're thinking about it within that context and not necessarily, okay, what if someone uses it the wrong way, right? Or how could they potentially use this the wrong way? Because it's not just, oh, you know, that may lead to adoption friction. It literally could lead to efficacy issues, too, right? I mean, if they're like literally not using the product the right way, you could end up in funding a clinical study that has poor outcomes, not because the, not because Clearpin didn't work as an example, but literally people were not using it the right way or incorrectly. You know, I mean, so I think it's usually important. So talk to us a little bit. I mean, do those, I got to think that probably came up a little bit, right? Because you're,

you know, this is, you know, you're going, you're going from in office use to home use. So it's critically important point to nail on. Yeah, no question. And I think one of the other pieces there that's really important is also your ability to recover. So if you make a mistake, designing product so that they can go back and you can fix that mistake. So for example, our product has the ability to sort of lock out the activation until it's on the face in the right position. And based on that fact, it means that, you know, patient can't accidentally have to evade the device too early. They have to have it fully pressed up against the face, you know, in the proper orientation in order for the device to work. And so I think that's an example of.

of the kind of design tradeoff where you might say, well, it's okay if you just have a button you can push any time. We'll just tell patients to put it on first before they push it. But if you pick it up accidentally and push that button, now you've wasted a dose, maybe you have to go back to your physician, get another one, you know, this will be a prescription product. So that's going to be one of your uses. And so those were the kinds of sort of decision matrix tradeoffs

that the engineering team sat and said, okay, let's find another way to make sure that that doesn't happen. So if you think about those misuse scenarios, how do you keep that from happening? And how do you also make it so that if they did push the button, in our case, it doesn't work so they can recover by just stopping pushing the button. Yeah. They can still continue to use the product. Yeah, I'm sure you've heard this.

I'm not sure the misperator described it as analogy or maybe just a framework of like, is this a glass door decision or is this a decision that we can kind of like, the door's open and we can kind of go go back the other way. You know what I mean? And that comment that you made, right, about like, is this a, is this something that could eventually be fixed, right? Because if it is, if it is, let's just move forward with what we think is going to work now, knowing that we can kind of walk it back later. But if it's a, if it's a glass door and the glass is shattered, that's going to be a little bit more, a little bit more difficult. So kind of thinking through some of those decisions and that, and that with that frame of mind, I think is

helpful for anyone, anyone that's building a, building a startup in those early, those early days. Yeah. Yeah. into the hands of users as early as you can as often as you can because patients and consumers will teach you a lot about how they think about things, what makes sense to them, how they would use a product like this. And the details matter. It's almost as much as what they don't say as what they do say in a lot of those situations. Yeah, I couldn't agree with more. It just speaks to the importance of just being as close to your customers, your end users as possible. And so, And I think sometimes it's easy to be like, well, we've got this usability study that's planned for

three months down the road or four months down the road. But there's oftentimes these periods leading up to that that are very iterative, right? And if you're close to physicians, if you're close to patients or consumers, you're largely going to be able to prevent some major issues coming up as a part of that usability study, you're going to be able to solve for those well in advance. These informal types of, you know, we sometimes call them friends and family types of studies, they're certainly not the validation method that you're going to use in a submission, but they can be incredibly helpful in making some of those tradeoffs early and avoiding going down a pathway that ultimately doesn't pan out.

Yep. It reminds me of there's this conference that we, this was discussed going on a year and a half ago, and we were getting feedback on a device handle. And one of the physicians who I would argue is, I mean, he was a KOL, I mean, high volume user as well. So kind of a unique blend where he still does a lot of. procedure of all you and talks on podium, et cetera, et cetera. He picked up the handle and not in a way of which we expected, right,

of someone to kind of control it with one hand. He picked it up like a, like a gaming console, like a gaming controller for a console. And I was like, oh, that's so interesting. And he was younger. I mean, tended to be younger. So that's probably, you know, I mean, that's sort of maybe a natural, kind of a natural way to kind of pick up a design like that. And I was like, oh, that's so interesting.

It wouldn't have been something that we would have picked up on, right? if we didn't, we weren't going through some of those informal sort of feedback feedback sessions. So yeah, so just can't can't reiterate. It saved you, saved you some time in thinking about the next day. Well, yeah, at the very least, that's in your, that's in your head, right? As you kind of think through, even though that's maybe not the way most people are going to naturally pick up a handle that's kind of, that's designed in that way. Absolutely, you're thinking about, okay, could someone, could someone misuse this or miss, you know,

would this cause, you know, someone to use this in the wrong way? like it's just helpful to have some of those outlier, that outlier type of feed, type of feedback. So with that said, let's let's talk a little bit about this, the stealth period that you kind of recently emerged from, right? And you obviously made the decision to stay stealth for a while and then kind of come out of that period. Give us a sense for like, you know, why you guys made that decision versus trying to, you know, more, I would say build kind of more in public, if you, if you will. And how do you, how do you kind of, like, what's your typical advice for other other entrepreneurs that are kind of trying to make that decision. I mean, do we stay quiet? How long

do we stay quiet? When do we kind of come out and tell the world about what we're doing? Hey, everyone. Let's take a quick break to talk about Fast Wave 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 of oversubscribed funding rounds bringing the total investment into Fastwave to over $50 million. Corporate interest in the IVL space is growing two, 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. There are definitely pros and cons, you know, to each style of building. And I think a lot of it does depend on, you know, we're fortunate to have, you know, a really strong group of early investors, you know, who had conviction and believed in what we were doing. And so we didn't need as much public validation in order to gain access to that capital.

Sometimes that's not the case and you just simply don't have a choice. You've got to get out there and tell a bigger story and be more public. I think for us in particular, too, it was really about starting to establish some of the IP portfolio, thinking through some of that early clinical data and really establishing a strong position before we went out and started talking to both the investing public, I would say, but also consumers, because as a business who ultimately our end users are your next door neighbor, a random stranger you meet on the bus, those are the people who are going to be using the product. And it was really important to us that before we started to communicate with them,

we really had a strong position of data that supported where we were headed because it's critical in businesses like this to maintain that trust throughout the whole process. And absent that data, it's really, you're just making a statement with no, no receipts. Yeah. So having the receipts is an important piece to, you know, having the ability to speak candidly to, you know, to your actual target patients. Yeah. That's just such a smart way to think about, think through that. And I couldn't agree more with your thought process early on.

Like you had institutional investors, right, that were willing to support a company through kind of a stealth period of time, right? If you're in that boat, there's largely not a compelling need to be very front and center and be operating sort of in the public domain. Other startups may not, right? You may be kind of scratching and fighting for that next phase of capital. So it may be more urgent, right, for you to tell your story in the public and reach a wider audience. But your other kind of the latter part of your answer, though, I think is spot on. I remember having the founders of Sava come on. And they have, I'm not sure if you're familiar Osaba, but they, they built a pretty novel, like, wearable sensor, I think to eventually compete in the CGM space. But I asked them the same question because they, they were stelf for quite some time and they a little bit more consumer biased.

And they answered, I would say somewhat similarly to you in that they wanted to wait until the major technical questions, and I'm paraphrasing a little bit, but the major technical questions had been answered. Right. So in essence, to your point, to steal your phrase, they had receipts, right? they weren't guessing at that point once they came out in public. Like they were able to answer the most technical risk had been burned down. They had data to prove it, et cetera. And so they were, you know, there's more of a compelling reason to kind of like surface and begin to kind of tell their story in the public domain. Yeah.

Yeah. So I think that those are good approach. If you're in that boat, kind of a couple things to keep in. Particularly in businesses that are going to be communicating to consumers. And for us, you know, the rationale to, come out of stealth was we are starting clinical trials. We want to start to engage with that target audience. We want to be available and accessible so that they can see and understand what it is that we're building. And frankly, there's also just a lot of excitement from those patients and

from the providers and the physicians that we're talking to. And so sooner or later, we needed to get out there and be able to start talking about it in a bigger way. Yeah, no doubt. On that note, let's let's chat through your recent fundraise, right? Because I think you announced it late last year, the $25 million round. Congrats on that as we were chatting about before we hit the record button. It's just even though there's signs and signals that, you know, this year hopefully should be, you know, there should be some positive activity, fundraising, M&A, etc. It's just, it's always hard to raise. It's always hard to raise money for the life sciences. And so when you think about getting this round closed, are there a few things that like, like you know now, right,

after closing a pretty big round that maybe you wished you knew 10 years ago, right? Or like what do you think would be most helpful for others that are, you know, kind of new to the fundraising game to really, to really understand as the approach for capital raise? Yeah, I think it really came back to what we're talking about early on in the conversation about trying to carefully map out what data do we need by when to really justify value inflections in the business. And for us, you know, we'd finished our investigator-led trials. We'd really demonstrated equivalence between an in-office procedure and a patient-performed procedure.

And that, you know, that was a critical unlock fundamentally for the concept. And that was data that, frankly, didn't really exist anywhere else. And so by collecting that ourselves, being able to synthesize it, and then emerging from that sort of the next phase of clinical device, product, and design, that was the, That was the real critical unlock to say, okay, with additional capital, we can now go run phase two, develop additional commercial hardware and product so that ultimately, you know, we can get this thing to market as quickly as possible. And when you can start to outline what those use of proceeds will be for exactly how those are going to leverage into the next step of value,

I think that's the critical part to, you know, ultimately having investors gain conviction. And, you know, that's the name of the game. At the end of the day, they've got to, they've got to believe in what you're doing, that you have the team that can do it, that you've got the data that backs it up. And when you combine those things together, then it's about finding sort of founder, funder fit and also funder market fit. And I think those are, those are really two critical variables that are sometimes difficult to tease out early on in a process. There are a lot of investors out there. Every size, shape, flavor of investor pretty much exists today. And the key is finding investors who really sort of are aligned in the same North Star you are as a business.

Yeah. And so for us, we're really lucky, you know, atomic, foresight, Polaris, all see that intersection of science and concerns. consumer and the opportunity to build products that resonate with real people and identify that the market is shifting in that direction. So for us, you know, we see huge opportunity in that space. I think GLP ones, you know, before that, you know, auto injectors in the monoclonal space, you know, insulin pens have all been shifting this at-home injection as a common practice. and I think what, almost 10% of Americans have now been out of GLP1 and until hopefully soon, right, with pill versions of GLP1, but they were all injectable.

So that means, you know, one in 10 people have self-injected for a treatment at home now. And 10 years ago, that was not true. Yeah, yeah. Your syndicate, I mean, that's an impressive syndicate, right? I mean, we talked about hymns and hers, but I think Atomic was maybe the original investor in Hems and Hers. Yeah, they were the founder, the founding team. Yeah.

So Jack started Hymns and, or started Atom, excuse me, as a, you know, a venture studio to help commercialize, you know, concepts that emerge from that, that space. And so, you know, we're, we're hoping to be another, another Hins and Hurs coming out of that process. Yeah. Certainly we've got some solid investors around the table, which is, which again, congrats on that. I mean, that's just, you've been able to, you've been able to build out a collective of some, some impressive folks, no doubt. And we, we touched on earlier, on just the importance, right, of being able to clearly communicate, in essence, what you're funding, right, with this capital and what that's ultimately going to lead to in terms of

evaluation. I can't, and I can't remember the interview that we published. It was probably within the past couple months, but I'd be drawn blanks here in terms of the name. But anyway, we talked about that point of like, there's all kinds of different aspects, right, that go into a pitch, right? You know, communicating the market size, how your technology is differentiated, etc. But the single most important point by far is return on capital, right? You've got to be able to communicate what's being funded with this money and what is that going to lead to in terms of valuation, right? And if you don't, if you don't nail that, everything else is kind of secondary and it sounds like you've been effectively able to do that. I guess one more follow-up question

on fundraising, kind of just focusing on the syndicate that you've built. Really impressive group. Any other thoughts around how to, you know, because sometimes it can be intimidating, right, when you're approaching quite literally some of the best of the best in terms of VCs in a certain category. Any other thoughts around how to how you've been able to successfully do that or what, you know, in terms of kind of, you know, going from initial pitch to follow up meetings, et cetera, like what's been what's been helpful? Personally, for me at least, you know, one of the things that's always helped me in these situations is just making sure that there's such a deep set of knowledge, data, and facts behind what it is that we're saying.

So that while we may distill it down to a very simple concept or a market size or a tam or a revenue opportunity, each of those has enough backup that we can sit there and say, ask as deep as you want to go and we're going to be ready with really validated answers to those questions. And at least for me personally, that's always helped from a confidence standpoint in being able to shrink things down to, you know, sort of bite-sized pieces by knowing that underneath of that is, you know, a stack of receipts that makes sure that that that statement, you know, is going to hold up. It won't always agree with you, but knowing that at least allows you to say, you know, with confidence that, yep, that's that's the size of this market. And we know we have, we have confidence in that answer. And we think you should too. Yeah. Yeah. That's, um, so it's, it's. It's. It's.

interesting that you bring this up because we've all seen the pitch decks, right? Of like Airbnb's, you know, series A pitch deck or whatever, name your like hot company, whether it's in the life sciences or the, you know, the technology space consumer, whatever. And it's like, oh, the slide deck looks so simple. But the complex part of that is distilling, right, you know, all of the work that laddered up to that one point, right? And knowing that, like the back of your hand, yes, the slide may look simple, but certainly the background information that was that was collected and reviewed and analyzed, you know, It wasn't simple.

And you kind of, you forget about like, yeah, it's a simple deck, but all of the questions that came that came as a part of that pitch in multiple pitches around that deck. I mean, I just think it's, I'm glad you brought that up, right? I mean, it's goal is to communicate with simplicity and sort of a straightforward approach, right? And that's hard. Yeah. I'm not perfect at it. There's no question.

There's always, always room for improvement in those areas. But, yeah, I think that that is the key at the end of the day when you look at those really simple decks. They're only simple because there are probably a thousand pages of appendix behind each of those points that investors are going to dig into. Once they dig into it, then they can come back and say, yep, totally buy exactly what you're saying at the top here. But until you have that, if you don't have that backup, it's really challenging to defend those points. No doubt, no doubt. I've got a couple of questions left before we get to the rapid fire portion of this interview. And I'm going to skip to the last one and then circle back around

to my second second, the second one. But let's talk a little bit about hiring, right? Because you've scaled teams multiple times now, right? Especially over the past decade, right, at several startups. And so what are maybe a couple non-obvious things or, and maybe they are obvious, but you just think they need to be emphasized, right, around how you go about not only identifying and recruiting, but also convincing, right, folks to join your team. So one of the key things I've always looked for, you know, in addition to technical skill set, you know, for whatever the role it is that we're hiring is really just an inherent curiosity. I think if you aren't getting good questions back, if people aren't questioning fundamentally the why behind what they're doing, why they're doing

it, that's key, especially in these early stage startups, because we don't know the answer to everything. We don't have a 10,000 person organization. That's just a big machine where you're turning the crank. You need people to pick up their heads and say, why are we doing this? Or why are we doing this way? This seems like we're not answering the fundamental question or we're missing a major chunk. And I think especially in scaling startup teams, you have to have people who are really talented and skilled at whatever it is that they're going to do.

So period, full stop. That's sort of the start. point. But beyond that, I think trying to identify people who just have this innate curiosity and are willing to kind of question the why in the world, at least for me and the way I like to think about engineering teams and technical development, I think that's a really critical skill set that ultimately helps unlock a lot more value and allows you potentially to skip a lot of operational steps that might otherwise be built into workflows that they inherited from either other companies or experiences that they've had. Yeah, it's something that I look for as well.

And it usually stands out. I'm not sure if you're if you if you kind of would agree. It usually surfaces throughout the interview process. But if you ever made the decision to sort of where you where your intuition says this person isn't that isn't surfacing, right? They're not asking enough questions or they're not they don't seem to be as interested. But you've you've made be made the higher because of their experience or their pedigree. And it ultimately is not as not worked doubt as you expected. Certainly have been in the situation where yes, either by by skill set or especially in in sort of niche skill sets where the number of people who have those are limited. I think there are sort of two approaches that that I've taken. One is for a very specific given

skill set, sometimes you have to work, you have to coach the players that you have. And so you find ways to instill that curiosity or enforce that curiosity by kind of first principles thinking and just overall planning. And sometimes you just simply identify that from a cultural standpoint, that person's not going to be a fit. And it's always better to, I think, trust your gut in those situations and say, hey, this is just, this is not the right person for the role. Let's go find that. I think, especially in small, nimble teams, those first I don't know, call it 10 to 20 hires are so key in establishing the culture, the expectations. And if you let your team down by bringing in talent, that's not up to par, they notice.

Yeah, yeah. They'll make their own decisions, you know, with their feet at some point if you can't be consistent in that. Yeah, no doubt. And if you, if you hire the right folks, that sort of that culture almost becomes almost organic, right? Like it's kind of, in other words, A players want to be around A players, right? right, in that sense, right? And so I think, I think that's kind of what you, what you mentioned

if I'm kind of reading between the lines. But the reason, the reason I ask about kind of trusting your intuition is like, I found more often than not that like good, good entrepreneurs, right? They do have good intuition, right, typically. And not that they aren't averse to risk or willing to take kind of uncalculated risk, but typically they know how, they know kind of where to lean in. And I just, I guess maybe my words of encouragement was like, I'm a huge believer in curiosity too. And if you if you're a big believer in curiosity or something else for that matter, trust your instincts as you kind of go through that, go to that process, because usually, usually, usually it's right. You know, and so I'll always take a technical person with curiosity

over just pedigree. I've, I've been at a few places where pedigree was a really important factor. And I'm unconvinced that that is the best signal for selection these days. Oh, 100%. 100%. And the reality is like these are long journeys, right? And so if you're not, usually curiosity is like, it's either part of or it's aligned with like just a, just a willingness to kind of, you know, lean in, right? And there's so many hurdles and challenges and, you know, across the years, maybe decades of a startup. You need people that are, you know, that really enjoy kind of the area, space and they're unafraid of challenges. Day to day to day problem solving. In a startup environment,

question you have to you have to be ready to just think differently and really tackle problems from a bunch of different angles to find yeah solutions because resources are constrained you know we're we are not we are not big pharma 100% with that said um i've got a couple rapid fire questions but just real quick kind of circling back around to kind of the early days of endoma did you know that you were going to i mean did you have from day one that you were to develop the clear pan And the reason I'm curious is like I mentioned earlier this, like I love these, these ideas, right? Where it's like this, this sticky kind of friction around something that has been proven to work. It just needs to be, access needs to be opened up in essence, right?

And I don't want to appreciate all of the steps that ladder up to developing something that can effectively be used at home in your case. But nonetheless, it's reasonably straightforward. So when you think about like these types of plays, were there other things that you considered? or how did you go about kind of landing on a clear pin? Really since the beginning that he bring a Durham procedure into the home, solve the sort of technique dependence of that procedure with device technology was kind of the core guiding principle for endomo. The pathway to commercialization, regulatory,

sort of how much of that full stack therapeutic process wasn't DOMA going to own. What might you partner? How might you think about other ways to get that access to patients? But we're pretty fortunate. I think in talking to a lot of entrepreneurs, there were very few pivots on the product. You know, when I talked to the very earliest sort of seed investors, we're still making the same thing. We're still solving the same problem based on the same core thesis.

of this large market of people with inflammatory acne does not have access to the best in class treatment that they can get in the office. And they should. There's no technical reason. There's no laws of physics that we're trying to break with what we're doing. You just simply have to find innovative ways

sort of within that overall standard to make it happen. Good way to kind of wrap up this, this portion of the interview. We'll get to the rapid fire questions here in a second. But again, for everyone listening, endomotX.com is a website. I-N-D-O-M-O-T-X.com. We'll link to it in the full, the full write-up on MedSiter.

But if you don't happen to get to that write-up, definitely encourage you to check out the website. Very well-done website, for sure. Communicates a lot of science in a pretty easy-to-understand fashion. And if you know anyone that's been challenged with acne, it's probably a product or technology that you want to follow. So definitely encourage everyone to check out the site in more detail. And of course, again, we'll link to the website.

as well as Rick's LinkedIn profile in the full write-up on Medsiter. So with that said, Rick, let's get the last three of your rapid-fire questions. So free to answer those in rapid-fire fashion. If you want to expand a little bit, that's totally fine. But all right, since co-founding the company back in, I guess you were what, you said four plus years in the make. Way 21. So we're going to have four years, four years in there.

Late 21, 22. Four plus years. Almost five years now. What's the most surprising or unexpected thing that you've learned? For me, the most surprising thing was understanding how little data is available on old drugs. So just having now reviewed, you know, what these submission packages looked like 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago compared to the FDA's expectations today, they are wildly divergent. And so it's always fascinating to me to just see how much, you know, both industry and regulators have really

improved their ability to assess safety and efficacy for the products that we're launching. All right. If you had a room full, let's see we're on the East Coast, maybe you're in your neck of the woods. You've got a room full of med tech or biotech entrepreneurs. What's the one one lesson that you would really want them to kind of understand and like fully take home? Make sure you're solving real problems for patients, providers, or payers, and cool technology is not enough. So problem matters a lot. No doubt. Fremendously. All right. Let's take us back to maybe late 20s, early 30s.

Your career probably is beginning to kind of really take off at that point. What's any anything, one particular thing might you tell the younger version of yourself at that point in time? I think early in my career, I always thought there would be a perfect moment to start a company when I finally knew enough about whatever industry, space. the process and everything would feel just super confident. And I think that never happens. At least it's never happened for me. And I've been doing it a long time now. So my advice, my former self would be just go for it. You know, there's never a perfect time and perfection is the enemy, a good enough in a lot of cases. And so just rip off the bandaid and take a shot. And take a, take a step. Yeah, take a rep. Reps are important for sure. Yeah, great, great answer. So with that said,

Rick, can't thank you enough for coming on the on the program. This is, this is a lot of fun. It'd be fun to watch, watch your progress too. You've got a really cool product, a great team, and it could really, really solid set of investors around the table. So it be fun to watch what's ahead for Endo. Yeah, we're excited. 2026 is a big year for us, and we're really excited about what's in store here. I can understand why. Thanks again for having me, having me on the podcast. I love, love what you're doing and the sort of depth and detail you get to with folks like me who are maybe outside of the general media space and gives us a window and some insight into what it takes.

It really does take a village to build businesses in this space. And so this is a great way for entrepreneurs and investors and other people to really understand how it works. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I love being able to shine a light on what others are building, right? Because it's a, I use this phrase probably arguably too much, but like startups are always hard, but especially in the in the life sciences space, whether it's medsac, or biotech, it's like playing the game on hard mode, you know. And so, so yeah, love, love giving it's so important for the world. Oh, no doubt. This is where innovation that changes people's lives, you know, comes to light. And it is hard, but it's hard for a reason. If it was easy,

everyone else would do it already. 100%. Yeah. So I'll have you hold on the line real quick. But again, thanks everyone for your listening attention. EndomotX.com is the website, I-N-D-O-M-T-X.com. Definitely check it out. And appreciate your Your interest in Medsider, as always, until the next episode of Medsider goes live. Everyone, take care. Hey, it's Scott again. One quick thing before you go. You see, I love bringing you insightful conversations with the best founders and CEOs of medical device and health technology startups.

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