Medsider: Learn from Medtech and Healthtech Founders and CEOs - Doing Well by Doing Good: Interview with Proprio CEO Gabriel Jones

Episode Date: September 20, 2023

In this episode of Medsider Radio, we sat down with Gabriel Jones, co-founder and CEO of Proprio, who has had a career spanning engineering, law, finance, and philanthropy across the world. Gabriel studied engineering at the University of Washington before furthering his career at Tase Kensetsu, a major civil engineering and manufacturing firm in Japan. He then moved to Wall Street to work on large-scale mergers and acquisitions for high-profile clients like AT&T and Google. After returning to Seattle, Gabriel collaborated with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on global healthcare initiatives. Today, he is the CEO of Proprio, a revolutionary medtech startup aiming to improve surgical precision with AI-powered technology.In this interview, the eclectic Gabriel shares how his background has equipped him with a unique framework for creating a thriving startup ecosystem, tips on capital fundraising, and using public relations to his favor.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. 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 Gabriel Jones.

Just think about the low-hanging fruit and how big and juicy those fruits are. I would appeal to their humanity and say, come build something that matters. And I appeal to their capitalistic nature because we can be altruists and capitalists. And I'd say, come build something profitable and impactful and fulfilling in the space right now because there's never been a better time. 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 duo. 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, Scott, in this episode of MedSider, I sat down with Gabriel Jones, CEO of Proprio. Before co-founding the company in 2016, Gabriel had a career-spending engineering, law, finance, and philanthropy all across the world. He studied engineering at the University of Washington before furthering his career at a major

civil engineering and manufacturing firm in Asia. Then he delved into Wall Street to work on large-scale mergers and acquisitions for high-profile clients like AT&T and Google. Returning to Seattle, he collaborated with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on Global Healthcare Initiatives. Here are a few the key things that we discussed in this conversation. First, to truly create a long-lasting impact your company needs to function as a platform that benefits all as partners. Don't think of your startup as a solitary entity, but a part of a larger system where your success can uplift others. Second, raising capital is a challenge that tests a founder's skills, patience, and ability to adapt. Take a phased incremental approach to growth, focus your efforts, implement timing cushions,

and put yourself in the shoes of the investors you're pitching. Third, marketing communications or PR, is not an afterthought or a checkbox to tick off. It should be an integrated part of how you envision leadership, both as a tool for inspiration and a framework for building a sustainable road ahead for your company. Okay, so before we jump into this episode, if you're listening to this show, make the assumption that you're a dedicated pro looking to learn from the best in the business. If that's the case, which I think it probably is, I've got some exciting news related to our premium memberships. First, let's talk a little bit about MedSider Playbooks, your ticket to going from zero to 100

with your company or your career. You see our team as handpicked collections of the most insightful interviews with the brightest founders and CEOs, people like Nadim Yard, CEO of CVRX, and Mike Carousie, serial medtech entrepreneur and general partner at Lightstone Ventures. These proven leaders share their strategies and tactics for running a successful start. up. Whether you're looking to master capital fundraising, navigate early stage development, tackle regulatory challenges, understand reimbursement, or maybe even position your venture for a meaningful exit, Medsider Playbooks have got you covered. And the best part, all of them are available to our

premium members. Get instant access to these valuable resources at Medsiderradio.com forward slash premium. Again, that's medsiderradio.com forward slash premium. Okay, here's the second thing. I completely understand that fundraising can be one of the most daunting tasks for any startup, especially in today's environment. That's why we've created a meticulously curated database of investors right at your fingertips. Explore a wealth of 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. But that's definitely not all. When you become a Medsider premium member, you'll get access to every volume of Medsider

mentors, where the brightest founders and CEOs share their invaluable learnings. Plus, you'll unlock the entire archive of every MedSider interview dating back to 2000. So if you're serious about advancing your career or your startup and want to tap into this treasure trove of knowledge, it's time to consider becoming a Medsider premium member. Visit MedsiderRadio.com forward slash premium to learn more. All right, without further ado, let's jump back into the interview. All right, Gabriel, welcome to Medsider. Appreciate you coming on. Hey, thanks, Scott. I'm fired up. This will be good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We had a nice little free interview discussion. And this should be definitely a fun conversation. As you rightfully correcting me on the actual pronunciation of the company, right?

proprio. I got to say that over and over again. Sometimes I'll get off on the wrong foot. But yeah, no, welcome to the show. Really appreciate you doing this interview. I think it'll be fun, lots of good topics, especially considering you're just coming off a podcast with Jason Calcanus, which not too, not too many folks in kind of the life sciences are metacking up on his show. So that'll be fun to talk about a little bit as well. So I recorded a brief bio at the outset of this interview. But let's start there. if you can give us kind of an elevator pitch for kind of your career leading up to, you know, co-founding the company. And maybe we can kind of weave in, this wasn't on the original question list, but maybe we can kind of weave in your thoughts around sort of different tech ecosystems as well.

So let's start a little bit more without you. And then we'll learn a little bit about the company and then maybe, you know, take that question out of the gate. Sounds good, Scott. Yeah, whenever I'm asked that question, you know, whether it's like, you know, going into a master's in business class at University of Washington or something, sometimes I get a chance to speak to some of those students who are PhDs, master candidates from all sorts of different disciplines. I think there's two versions of the story that, you know, you can tell. The polished one, the one you get to work on on LinkedIn, where everything just makes a lot of sense, it goes chapter to chapter, and you just kind of go, yeah, that's logical. And wow, this person has, you know, quite a story that just, you know,

is a linear path. And we have to demonstrate that we can tell that version, right? But the much more interesting one is the Joseph Campbell Belly of the Beast. Like, what were the hard choices? What'd you get wrong? What was not obvious to do next in your life and career? And I think hopefully those are the kind of conversations we can get into. I'll get you the very quick summary. It's just like confessions of a curious mind, right? It really is just that. I'm a person who is perpetually curious and I cannot stop. So I've learned to get out of the way of that, just let it do its thing. So the super a quick summary would be, you know, began my career in engineering in Japan, studied Japanese at a master's level in University of Washington. They had this amazing program where they taught mechanical,

electrical engineering and some computer science, all taught by Japanese professors. So every word is in Japanese. You're learning to do CAD modeling in Japanese, just really unusual program. And I was obsessed. So I studied really hard and competed with the Japanese students who were in that master's program as well and did fairly well. As a result of that, went to Japan and worked for a very large engineering manufacturing firm. So why do that? Beyond just Japan's a very interesting place and culturally and historically amazing, I really wanted to fundamentally understand how are things designed, engineered, manufactured at scale. So how do you do that just in time manufacturing, Toyota methodologies? They are literally the masters of that. And so I literally went to the largest

civil engineering and manufacturing firm in Asia, which is Tai Say Kensetsu and worked for them for a few years there as their only non-Japanese employee. So you can kind of see how my mind works. I want to understand fundamentally how to systems work. And so I went from there to, all right, I want to understand how legal systems and governance works. So I went to Washington, D.C., of course, worked in white shoe law firms and ran 100-person litigation teams and all that kind of good stuff, some exposure to Supreme Court, et cetera. So really trying to understand fundamentally how does a country and a system of laws

are they getting made, how do they work such that they do work. We can talk about how some things don't actually function. But sort of from there, where do you go? Of course, Wall Street, right? I needed to understand how do things like companies and products and assets get bought, sold, valued, transacted.

So three years on Wall Street, top law firm there, buying and selling, facilitating the purchase and sale of all these assets and companies. So customers like or clients like AT&T, Google, and big manufacturing firms. So you're kind of, again, getting a sense of how my brain works, right? Not very satisfying to me personally to work on Wall Street for that much longer than three years. So once I felt like I understood that, it was time to tackle something else.

And there was this question burning in my head, which was, is it possible to do well and do good? I just don't know, so I need to find out, right? And once I start asking myself a question like that, there's really no solution that is acceptable to quench that thirst, but to go try to do it. So it came back to Seattle without really a plan, but focused on the Gates Foundation because I wanted to understand,

have they cracked the code on global programs, to help people out of poverty, to get people access to health care on a global scale where the setting in circumstances in which they were born is not any longer relevant to what the outcome of their life is financially in terms of the health care that they can get for themselves and their children. So that was the burning question. Came back here, was fortunate enough to finish a couple master's degrees at University of Washington, including an MBA as part of that. Somehow I ended up working for Bill Gates

at a bespoke team that worked for his private office, basically on any special projects that Bill cared about. Don't ask me how I got that job. Interesting stuff. You know, kind of woke up one day wondering, all right, people are coming to me to ask me how things work in the world and how do we start companies and build products. And so a little bit of imposter syndrome led me to, all right, if I'm really going to try to answer those questions for people who are asking me them because of the name on the business card and not mine, but Mr. Gates, I need to go build something very difficult from scratch. So if you drew like a matrix or a graph and you looked that like very hard things that could be very impactful, that most people are just too sane

to go try to tackle. That's sort of what led to the founding of ProPrio, which I'm sure we're going to talk about somewhat and uniquely being focused in Seattle, as you mentioned, ecosystems. Again, look at that graph and up in the corner where technology, especially scalable technologies like software and cloud computing, I mean, Seattle's the cloud capital of the world. We have all the major providers here, including two of the largest Microsoft and Amazon are right down the street from me. And so what better place with a world-class healthcare institution like University of Washington, which receives the second most grant dollars of any institution from NIH after Harvard, you know, that's the perfect place to build something like this and to try to seed an ecosystem where technology and medicine could really intersect and amplify each other.

Yeah, yeah. I want to get back to that question around kind of this ecosystem. system. But before we go there, we can probably spend the rest of the conversation really talking about your sort of progression, if for lack of a better description, kind of throughout your journey is probably a better way to describe that. But one thing that you mentioned is like this natural curiosity, right, this appetite. How important is that in the world of the entrepreneurial world, right? Do you think that's something that can be learned or is it something that just inherently there? Because I do think it's one of the, it's probably one of the things that stands out

most when I meet like really successful entrepreneurs is they, they're always just curious about a lot of things and they're not afraid to take swings. So I don't know, just curious, kind of hearing you describe kind of that journey or the past, you know, 15 to 20 years. It seems like obviously that's an inherent quality that you have, but I want to get your take on it. Yeah, good question. So my perspective is there are levels to it, right? A lot of people perceive themselves as perpetually curious when you surround yourself with people who are like that, who are, let's say, a level five, level seven, whatever it is, right? I'm just arbitrarily throwing out those numbers. but if you get yourself around a table full of entrepreneurs who are off the charts curious about things,

their line of questioning, their listening ability, the really good ones, and their ability to structure an answer and walk through a story to what their current conclusion is, you know, to quote Mark Andreessen, you know, strong beliefs weekly held, however we want to approach that, they just exhibit those kinds of characteristics. So if you hang around them, you're going to pick that up and you're going to pick that up. going to get even more intensely curious about what they're doing or they're thinking, and you're going to question them and not necessarily take all their conclusions as fact. You want to go and poke them and see how they got to that conclusion where they made a huge life decision to go found

a company to solve this pernicious problem in whatever space, MedTech or anything. And so you end up finding yourself being more and more curious and one thing begets the other. So you end up in that seven, eight, nine, and ten level of curiosity also because, you know, we're competitive. We want to keep up. I want to know something you don't know, Scott. That's right. There's certainly an element to that. It reminds me of this one of my friends, his name is Justin Mayers, mostly known for his consumer health companies like kettle and fire and perfect keto. And he's now working on TrueMed and several others. He's a venture partner, I think, at Long Journey Ventures, but kind of more well known in that in that arena. But he was recently

on the Patrick O'Shaunahee podcast and they were talking about this concept of Edge City. and where like most of the people that he hangs around that are more entrepreneurial, they kind of came up with this concept of like they're always like thinking about things on the edge, right? And so if you're around those types of people that are always like, what if it didn't have to exist this way or what if it could look like this, right? It does foster that sort of that getting into that next level, you know, so to speak. So anyway, your answer kind of reminded me that. I think the concept to dovetail with that for you.

And I heard that story and I've read some of his writing. I love the thought of. And I remember Patrick getting really excited about. I'm going to steal that and ask people like, are you living in Edge City? I think there's another concept of sort of the active player, right? Are you one of the small number of people in the world who call it some number of thousands, perhaps,

that in any given moment has a seat at the table? And as a kid who grew up, you know, very poor food stamps, getting kicked out of all sorts of, you know, housing and so on. Not a unique story. A lot of people have grown up like that. but just that sense of you're never done. You want to be in the game and stay in the game and have a chance to learn something.

People often talk about making your own luck, right? You know, we've got a lot of privilege just by being in this country at this moment in time with technology available to us where if we go get it and convince some people to come on a journey with us and build something, you're in the game. That's not enough to win the game, but you're in the game. Now you want to stay in the game. And that's very motivating. And so for your audience, as far as I understand them, you know, part of this conversation is about let's get in the game.

Yeah. Doing interesting companies that are in physically amazing places. I'm going to obviously pitch Seattle here because it's, I think, the best place to live. But the idea that we should all be very motivated to work on solutions like this, ProPrio and others that are at that intersection where the tools and the technologies right now are even more exciting than they were yesterday or last year or 10 years ago. Right, right. I love the Pacific Northwest, by the way. It's just I needed a little bit more sun, just a little bit more sun. Well, we got the video going.

I think your audience is on audio, but it looks like you've been getting some good sun. That's right. I try. Even though I'm a little bit more of a ginger, you know, by nature, I try to get out in the sun. And I want to circle back around this ecosystem concept because I think it's really important, especially based on kind of some of my experiences in, you know, formerly living in Minneapolis. But if you're presenting in front of like an eighth grade, you know, middle school class, what is it what are you guys doing give us a sense for kind of what this is for those that have never

heard of the company yeah yeah so let's go we'll take the eighth grade middle school kind of paradigm and talk about it so today when a very well-trained surgeon goes to try to fix your back or your knee or your shoulder or even you had a tumor in particular areas of your body right let's take a spinal tumor for example how do they figure out how to go in there and solve those problems, right? Because the goal of the surgery is not to go and put a screw in your back or even to do a spinal fusion or a knee replacement. That's not the purpose. The purpose is to take the anatomy from your body, from the conditions it's in, maybe an injury, a trauma, a car accident, or something got got, you know, kind of over time degenerated or got worse in your body. And it's

to take that back to the, the healthiest state we can get it into, right? That's sort of the before and after. A great analogy is I'm trying to get somewhere, right? And I've got GPS, I've got Google Maps. I've got all these great tools now. I didn't always have those, right? I might have had a printed map, Rann McNally, MapQuest, whatever you might think of. And that's sort of helpful, certainly, but can you imagine trying to read a map while you're driving? We've all done it. But it's not the safest thing to do. And it's certainly not the most up-to-date information. And it's not the way that humans best interact with the world around. So even the name of the company is pro pro pro pro pro pro pro pro proreception is the human brain's ability to perceive and map the world around our bodies and recognize the relationship between our bodies and the world around us.

I can pick up this coffee cup without even looking at it. I didn't drop it and squeeze it. I didn't break it, right? We start doing that when we're five or six months old as little babies. So what better time when computer vision. and robotics and AI are at their next plateau before the next one, right? They're growing so rapidly in their capabilities to try to take those and apply them to the physical world around us in a space like surgery, map everything, map the body,

give the surgeon the feedback they want, not a printout, not an x-ray on a screen, but an immersive, 3D volumetric environment in which the anatomy is updating in real time as they're making changes and trying to solve that problem, well, yeah, of course, the data should be updating in that way too. So that's the simple way to look at it is, you know, the world operated on printed maps before. And now we're saying, no, no, you get to work directly with the body, directly with the patient, solving problems with 3D real-time information and data,

leveraging the best that technology has to offer today. I think that's a pretty exciting moment. Yeah, no doubt. And I'm looking at the site, and I definitely encourage everyone that's listening. We'll link to it in the full summary article for the interview, but it's propriovision.com. So P-R-O-P-R-I-O-Vision.com, really killer website. And so before we kind of get to the next kind of question, because I do want to circle background of this ecosystem concept, because you're obviously building out something

pretty special here, which requires a team of talented folks, a lot of folks probably. So I want to circle back around to that. But what does the end goal for appropriate look like here? maybe in five years or even 10 years, maybe go out a little bit further. What is the goal is? Every hospital, every specialty, whether it's an interventional cardiologist or a general surgeon, are they using proprio in an OR and a cath lab? What's this look like?

What's five to 10 years down the road look like? Yeah, any type of surgery where real-time feedback from a system, a platform for surgery, whether it has robots attached to it or there's other, you know, the surgeons using their hands directly or instruments and tools and kind of everything in between along that spectrum is informed and improved in terms of performance and the data and the information that's available to the surgeon however they're performing that surgery we want to impact that right so whether it's spine surgery which is a very large industry 30 billion in reimbursements a year in the u.s and growing whether it's knee like a total knee replacement you know that's a 23 billion dollar

opportunity in the u.s today you kind of just go down the line. Cranial, it's $8 billion. These are large, from a market perspective, they're large. And then in spine, there's 1.6 million procedures done per year in the U.S. surgical procedures. This is from decompressions of, you know, a compressed spine around the disc. We've all had friends who have had that injury to really bad deformities like a scoliosis case, right, where adolescent, teenager might have a very different path in their life if they don't get it fixed in a particular way that's very effective. But those surgeries are really only effective to the goals of the surgeon about 35% of the time, right? The correction of the curvature of the

spine to a healthy one only happens 35% of the time. So of course, there's downstream impacts to that. You can kind of look through every area of surgery and they all have a key problem like that at the center of the bull's eye. But if you solve it, right, scraping away a tumor, cell by cell pixel by pixel and only having to do one surgery on that tumor, not multiple, right? The average breast cancer patient has two and a half to three surgeries for the same pathology, right? Why can't we get that right the first time? These are thorny, difficult problems, and they exist at the center of the bull's eye for every area of surgery. So our goal is ambitious. It's to find and address each one of those things that is the most difficult in each of the areas,

and then expand from there. And the low, long-term goal is it's perfection. We want perfection and prediction for surgery. So the outcome's known before you start or before the surgery is over. And that's a lofty goal, but if you break it up, it's actually a mountain that can be climbed. And we have enough line of sight now to a few procedural areas where we think that's going to happen in the nearer to midterm. And I think that's a great place to start and to build off of, but I want to be clear, ultimately, we want to take this everywhere. In fact, we feel it's our obligation to do so. Got it. Super helpful.

Again, I encourage everyone to take a look at the website. It's really cool. It reminds me of, I spent a short time at Touch Surgery, which is a London-based digital health startup. You may have been familiar with it. A company exited to Medtronic, but Proprio seems like 20, 30 years, like down the line, what, you know, something like that, or at least what we were working on back then, could have been initially, you know, turned into.

We saw their work. We liked their work. We wanted to see them go further. They got taken out a little early. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. not to underappreciate what doctors, Jean Neme and Andre Chow built, you know, really, really impressive entrepreneurs. But with that said, before we tack, I do want to, I do want to transition to this topic of like ecosystems, right? But what, where's the company at now? You're actively

commercializing this. We'll get into kind of the recent PIPT-H clearance, I think, that you received, but are you actively commercializing this now? Yeah, we've got, I mean, it's sort of overnight success, seven years in the making, right? All the good stuff. It kind of seems to emerge really quickly. But, you know, if you pay attention, we've been around for a while, working really hard in the background, like you said, with really skilled computer vision, robotics, engineers, augmented reality, certainly AI is a component of many aspects of what we're doing. But, you know, great hardware and systems engineers, quality, you need, you need all those things, right? Yeah.

Much of our marketing and product management team is, you know, engineers at their core. And so we look for those kinds of folks and we have them throughout the entire organization. So we're, we're coming up on 50, full-time people here primarily in Seattle. We have a great facility that we designed and built out in downtown Seattle. So we do cadaver labs, foresine studies, pretty much constantly with users on site here. One of the best things we did was built out a whole facility to do that early days of the pandemic. Turned out, doctors really wanted to get out of the hospital and go build something. And we've kind of built on that momentum over the last three years since we raised the series A in the middle of the pandemic first wave, which is a whole separate story for our next.

But that was quite an experience raising money from my kitchen. But we got it done. And then fast forward. So a lot of big milestones this year and more to come for sure. So FDA clearance was in April. That's for spine. And we will certainly expand that as we go. And that gives us a really nice launching point, though.

So really the center of that bullseye is covered there. then the series B funding announcement was a very recent really nice coverage. I think we saw pretty phenomenal numbers even before Jason and Callagannis and I had our conversation about 100 million impressions from the announcements associated with that. Wow. Yeah, really nice feedback from the community, really strong engagement. Everybody's excited about it, which is cool. And then coming soon, we have, again, seven years of market building effort.

now being applied to a three plus year funnel that we've built out, U.S. and outside of U.S. demand being pretty strong. So we've got our work cut out for us with the victims of our own success, some big launches and lots more announcements coming up between now and the beginning of next year, 2024. But really, the next two and a half, three years is about execution and continue to deliver all this promise. And we feel it's a pretty unique opportunity to do so. 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.

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