Medsider: Learn from Medtech and Healthtech Founders and CEOs - Solve the Workflow, Unlock the Market: Interview with Cooler Heads CEO Kate Dilligan

Episode Date: October 22, 2025

In this episode of Medsider Radio, we sat down with Kate Dilligan, CEO of Cooler Heads.Cooler Heads is a commercial-stage company addressing a problem affecting many chemotherapy patients undergoing treatment for solid tumors: hair loss and the loss of privacy that comes with it. The company's FDA-cleared medical device, Amma, makes scalp cooling accessible by fitting into infusion center workflows rather than disrupting them.Kate brings an unconventional background to medtech — from political fundraising to developing classified software for the U.S. government. As a solo female founder who had never worked in hardware, she started Cooler Heads in 2018 after her own experience with breast cancer. By mid-2025, the company had raised $11 million in Series A funding and placed devices across 27 states, with most accounts having never offered scalp cooling before.In this interview, Kate shares how to design for health system adoption by solving workflow problems first, why saying “no” to scope creep protects your first-generation product, and how political fundraising tactics translate directly to building investor relationships in medtech.Before we dive into the discussion, I wanted to mention a few things:First, if you’re into learning from medical device and health technology founders and CEOs, and want to know when new interviews are live, head over to Medsider.com and sign up for our free newsletter.Second, if you want to peek behind the curtain of the world's most successful startups, you should consider a Medsider premium membership. You’ll learn the strategies and tactics that founders and CEOs use to build and grow companies like Silk Road Medical, AliveCor, Shockwave Medical, and hundreds more!We recently introduced some fantastic additions exclusively for Medsider premium members, including playbooks, which are curated collections of our top Medsider interviews on key topics like capital fundraising and risk mitigation, and 3 packages that will help you make use of our database of 750+ life science investors more efficiently for your fundraise and help you discover your next medical device or health technology investor!In addition to the entire back catalog of Medsider interviews over the past decade, premium members also get a copy of every volume of Medsider Mentors at no additional cost, including the latest Medsider Mentors Volume VII. If you’re interested, go to medsider.com/subscribe to learn more.Lastly, if you'd rather read than listen, here's a link to the full interview with Kate Dilligan.

But I really dug into like what does this absolutely need to do and what is a nice to have. And I think one of the things that med, that like, especially first time founders, but anybody in Meddevice is like, you get design creep. But wouldn't it be cool if they could do all these other things. I'm like, yeah, it would be. But if it's not those, you know, three to four things that a variety of customers, like, and for me, it's, you know, community health systems, academic health systems, you know, private practices. What are those core features that they would need to see for them to get on board? 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 Kate Dilligan, founder, CEO of Coolerheads, a San Diego-based company developing evidence-based solutions that help cancer patients manage treatment side effects. After her own breast cancer diagnosis, she launched cooler heads to make scalp cooling

more accessible through AMA, the first FDA-cleared system designed for both patients and infusion centers. A Stanford MBA, Kate previously co-founded New Edge, an AI and speech recognition company where she led its U.S. government software division. Here are few of the key things that we discussed in this conversation.

First, you can't win accounts by solving for patients alone designed for the system's entire workflow. Hospitals don't adopt therapies that slow them down. Coolerheads focused on the operational bottlenecks that kept infusion centers from offering scalp cooling, freeing up chair time and easing nursing workload. The result was a product that worked not just for patients, but within the system. Second, reimbursement changes everything. Build your case before the codes arrive.

Kate reframed scalp cooling from a cosmetic perk to a clinical necessity aligning with payers early. By treating coverage as part of product design, cooler heads was ready when national cancer guidelines endorse scalp cooling and Medicare signal to permanent reimbursement codes, proof that timing favors those who prepare. Third, fundraising is persuasion, not paperwork, run it like a campaign. Kate approached investors the way she once approached voters. Map your network, ask directly and keep them engaged. Physician angels became both advocates and customers and consistent updates turned into not yet into I'm in. The result, $11 million raised and a movement

around a mission that's personal and powerful. All right, before we do, dive into this episode, I'm pumped to share that volume 7 of Medsider Mentors is now live. This latest edition highlights key takeaways from recent Medsider interviews with incredible entrepreneurs like Bill Hunter, CEO of Canary Medical, Brian Lord, CEO of Pristine Surgical, Don Crawford, co-founder of Safion and current CEO of Corvista Health and other proven med tech founders and CEOs. Look, we get it. Keeping up with every MedSider interview isn't easy. That's why we created Medsider Mentors. These e-book volumes distill the best practices and insider secrets from top founders and CEOs, all in a downloadable, easy-to-digest

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

Learn more about Medsider mentors and our premium memberships by visiting MedsiderRadio.com forward slash mentors. All right, without further ado, let's dive into the interview. All right, Kate, welcome to Medsider Radio. Appreciate you coming on. Really excited to be here, Scott. Thank you so much for the invitation. Yeah, yeah. Looking forward to hearing a little bit more about your journey as well as the company,

Coolerheads. And, you know, I've got people that are listening. Obviously, you can't see this, but you've got the product in the background. It's a good, good little shot on brand, you know, for these interviews and for any other virtual meeting, I guess, for that matter. But I recorded a very short bio at the outset of this episode, but probably doesn't do you justice. So let's start there. You know, you've got kind of an eclectic background.

right, going from politics to running a med tech startup. So give us a two-minute kind of elevator-style overview of your background leading up to starting a company. As you said, my first career was in politics. I graduated from, I got a Bachelor of Arts degree in history and didn't really know what to do with it. And grew up in a house where the Sunday morning news programs were always on. And we got both the New York and the LA Times every morning at my house. So I wound up after graduating from college interning at our member of Congress's office and was hired within a week on the on the campaign. And I went on to work in politics for six years where I actually was the finance director for one of the co-chairs of the Democratic National Party and who was the top target of

the Republican National Campaign Committee for her first cycle when I was her finance director. So, you know, it was really trial by fire and learning how to build something for nothing. And the thing I really credit politics with is, you know, with politics, you start off, you know, 21, 22, you get thrown into this maelstrom. And if you're good at it, which it turns out I was becoming, you know, finance director for the top target of the National Republican Campaign Committee, it's because you get really comfortable with complexity. And how do you raise millions of dollars back at the time when I was doing it? It was $1,000 or $5,000 at a time.

From there, went to Stanford Business School and then wound up partnering up with a mentor of mine. But again, doing something where there really wasn't a roadmap where we started a company that was developing the early stages of you know, it was now AI and LLMs. I was working in that space, you know, 2020 or 20, 2005, 2006. And we developed actually a lot of really innovative software programs that were used by the United States government. So I was actually back and forth to Washington, D.C. from Southern California on a weekly basis. And we were working in the classified space. And again, I'd gone to business school, but I'd worked in politics. I had undergraduate degree in history.

And all of a sudden, I'm working in national security where we needed to get a facility. clearance, but you don't get a facility clearance until you have a classified contract, but they can't award you that classified contract until you have a facility clearance. How do you solve that problem? You have to get really creative. And, you know, we went on to become really successful. I really loved my job. I'm working with the United States government, but like so many people in 2016, I was diagnosed with breast cancer, and that really threw me for a loop. And, you know, throughout my treatment, nobody was talking to me about symptom management. And, you know, having gone through cancer and in the years leading up to cancer, I'd lost both my parents.

So I decided to take a step back after I was done with treatment and kind of think about what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. And when I was undergoing treatment, I used an early instantiation of the product that we offer today to keep my hair because I was an executive. I didn't want people to know that I was sick. I was undergoing chemotherapy. And I worked throughout the whole time. It was really important for me to be able to look and feel normal as I was going. through treatment. And so after I left that company and took a couple of months off, was thinking about what I wanted to do, I was like, why isn't this therapy broadly available? And I'm

fortunate that I had a network that I, you know, even though I hadn't worked in Med Device, there were people that had gone to my business school that I could reach out to that I could start socializing this idea with. And it was actually two of my closest friends that really encouraged me to start this company when I was kind of spitballing with them one morning over coffee thinking, well, I have this idea for this company. And I think I should call it call it cooler heads and this is how we can make this therapy broadly available and they're like, you should do it. We'd invest and they did and here we are today. We're recording this in mid-25 and it looks like maybe you kicked off at least the base of my notes here. I'm looking at

your LinkedIn profile in 2018. 2018. Okay, yeah. It's been a journey. Yeah, seven years in the making. We could probably spend the rest of the interview just talking about kind of like your story. I mean, what an amazing ride, you know, and obviously we'll dig into every aspects of that, right, and how that has impact various decisions you've made, you know, building out cooler heads. But I guess I'd be remiss if I asked you, like, how are you doing now? Are you, I'm very fortunate that I'm healthy. And so no evidence of disease.

And we work with patients day in and day out that are not so fortunate. And I actually lost my best friend from business school in 2018 to metastatic breast cancer. And so it is never lost on me that, you know, people, I've had people say to me, oh, it's so fortunate that you've got cancer so you could start this company. And I'm like, nah, actually, I really would have rather not have gone through that. However, I have the best possible outcome. And my job is, you know, the way I view our role in the work that we're doing here is while we're not solving the fact that people have cancer, we're making it easier for men and women to undergo treatment so they can maintain the rest of their lives as they go through this health crisis.

A hugely inspiring space to operate in. And it's interesting. And we'll probably be to get into this in a little bit more detail here. but this concept of like developing tools that sort of make make, make it easier to kind of deal with with cancer. It's interesting. The company I started before Fastwave, we designed and developed photo biomodulation red light therapy devices,

primarily for consumer audiences. They were class two devices, but it was, you know, for recovery and health and wellness and that kind of arena. However, our director of content at the time, I can't remember what type of cancer it was, but he had cancer in his like early 20s. Like it was, it was extreme. And he mentioned he was like, there's like, he developed a really bad form of oral mucositis.

Yeah, that's really, really gnarling. Yeah. And there's like, he made, I mean, I remember we, we chatted about this because there's like actually some chat in depth about this, because there's some evidence that red light helps with with that aspect. But I guess I mentioned all that because there isn't, it doesn't seem like there's a lot of like devices, you know, or are available kind of therapies to help in this, in this area. So I'm kind of anxious to kind of learn a little bit more about about the company and the product and kind of what you've, what you've been through. be like building it out, you know, seven years now. So with that said, people listening to this know it's in the, it's in the oncology space, but give us a sense for, for, Ima. Tell us a little bit more about the product and, uh, and kind of the, you know, how,

how it's, how it's different than maybe other ways of kind of dealing with this issue. So first and foremost, I want anybody listening to this to know that most chemotherapy patients do not need to lose their hair. Now, cytotoxic chemo cause hair loss about 65% of patients. There are leukemia lymphoma patients and like, obviously, like, obviously, like the wee kids that you see on the St. Jude's commercials, scalp cooling is not for them. But for the majority of patients that are undergoing cytoxic chemo for solid tumors, they should be offered a choice about whether or not they want to keep their hair.

And the way the therapy works is continuously with every chemotherapy infusion, the patient wears a capping system that brings their scalp temperature down to about 65 degrees Fahrenheit continuously for before, during, and for several hours following chemotherapy. because what we're doing is vascular constriction. So the blood flow of that cytotoxic chemo isn't killing off the hair follicles because basically cytotoxic chemo is attacking every single fast-growing cell in your body to shrink that solid tumor. And that's why your hair falls out and your white blood cells get obliterated, your digestive lining, your nerve endings, and your fingernails.

And all these parts of our body, they're naturally rapidly regenerating. They're collateral damage because chemo is essentially napalm. And what we're doing is we're preventing that from really getting to the patient's scalp so the patients are able to keep the majority of their hair. You know, our innovations is all around, you know, this therapy has also been around for a while. So I can't say that we invented it. There are other players on the market that are also cleared by the FDA as we are. Where we've really leaned into is the design thinking and the implementation and how you do it. we have a machine that is small and portable. So when the patient is done with chemotherapy,

they can complete their post-chemo cooling, not in the infusion chair, but someplace else designated by the infusion center because chair time is so important to infusion centers because they've built their infusion centers for X number of patients a day. And so if all of a sudden, they can only do a fraction of that because patients are doing symptom management, because again, this is an additional two to three hours. So it can almost double the even amount of time. A patient is in that chair. And the infusion centers are going to make more money from chemotherapy. Like, they're never going to make the same amount of money with scalculing that they are with chemotherapy. However, by making this such that it is a light touch on the infusion

center team, it is, we're not taking a chair time. And now with Medicare moving the codes from category three to category one in January 2026, this is increasingly a therapy that chemotherapy patients expect. And one of the stats I'm really proud of is that over 70% of the accounts that we're in have never offered scalp cooling before. Or for example, we're at some major medical centers where maybe they would offer it in two of their primary infusion centers, but now with Amma, they're going to offer it throughout their health system network because it's finally something that is accessible for them from a workflow and a patient scheduling frame and mind. That's very cool. I'm especially interested in the kind of

the reimbursement aspect of that because that's oftentimes as you know you know like you're a device that like that's the holy grail right oh yeah yeah i mean it's arguably the the single biggest challenge right more so than regulatory hurdles right is like you know answering the question of who's who's going to pay you know how does this can get paid for so um so that that's awesome it sounds like and we'll get into this here in a second but it sounds like you know the design and how it how it integrates within the workflow is really a kind of a differentiator with uh with with alma so absolutely and and if you're listening to this and don't get to the full write up on medsider I highly encourage you to check this product out in more detail.

I think everyone listening probably knows someone that has been affected, either currently affected by cancer or has been. So it's just great to be aware of technologies like this, but it's coolerheads.com. So just as it sounds, coolerheads.com, which is a great domain, by the way. Thank you. Kind of surprised you.

You're able to get that one. I'm not sure if it costs you a pretty penny or if you're just kind of fortunate. It wasn't free. Let's just put it that way. Yeah. Yeah, I can imagine. But just to clarify one point that you mentioned, is something that's worn while the patient is getting chemotherapy. So it's in the natural.

Because because those chemo drugs are at their strongest when they're getting infused in the infusion center. So again, we want the patient to basically to cut off the blood flow to their scalp before our chemotherapy. So most chemotherapy patients have what's known as premeds, which is about 40 minutes of the anti-naudge meds and steroids and Benadryl that make it so when they turn on a cytotoxic chemo, the patient doesn't just heal over and pass out because, I mean, the drugs are really, really aggressive. So we bring the patient down to what we call therapeutic during the premeds, then they wear it continuously throughout the infusion and then for subsequent two to three hours afterwards. And another thing, just to clarify for people listening to this, you know,

I'm a breast cancer survivor, but we have prostate cancer patients, pancreatic cancer patients. We have both men and women that are using the platform because, again, we emphasize that this is not beauty. This is about privacy because, you know, Scott, like, I know that this is just an audio format. You've got a full head of hair. If all of a sudden you showed up at a board of directors meeting and you're bald, everybody's going to be like, are you okay? Is your partner sick? Is your family member sick? Why did you shave your head?

And then all of a sudden, you're not being seen as a CEO. You're being seen as like, oh, you're sick. Well, maybe he can't lead the funding round. Maybe we need to get somebody else. Like, it's really like, and people don't know how to deal with it. And so by enabling people that are out, you know, whether you're retired or you're working, like, I remember there was a, there was an incoming inquiry that we got from an elderly gentleman in Shreveport, Louisiana last year, who didn't want his prayer group to know that he had stage one pancreatic cancer. He just didn't want to talk about it. And he was desperate to get his hands on our product.

unfortunately we launched a report after he started chemo, but like this is something that really kind of speaks to as somebody who's been a chemo patient, a cancer patient, wanting to have my normalcy as much as possible and not have to talk about it. Like you're ready to talk about it when you're talking to your medical team, but not at work, not at the grocery store, not when you're at a social event, not when you're out at, you know, a school function for your kids. This normalcy thing is really where we are. And to your point about reimbursement, increasingly, you know, scalp cooling is now a two-way recommendation by the National Comprehensive cancer network. And so those are the 33 academic institutions that set the standard of care.

So it's not a 1A, but it's a 2-A recommendation. And increasingly, you know, payers are seeing this as side effect management, you know, like they are giving, you know, anti-emetic drugs and we're giving sometimes patients infusions for hydration following chemo. Like how do we make chemo more bearable so we can not only get patients into treatment because a stat that really is astonishing is 8% of patients that are recommended to have chemo refuse it because they don't want to lose their hair, which I think is crazy because I didn't know that I had a chance to keep my hair, but I was told I needed chemo and I was 42 and I wanted to live. Like that was the most important part.

It didn't occur to me to say no, but people do. And so how do we get people into treatment and keep them in treatment? so they can get the best possible outcome. Yeah, yeah. I think it's especially relevant considering, you know, probably by the time this is released, we'll be very, very close to kind of, you know, kind of that September, October, kind of fall time, right? Where we start to see the pink kids are awareness when this comes up.

And it's also the end of the year, right? So people have gone through their deductibles. And everybody was like, oh, I should go to the doctor. I should get that thing screen for. There's that little bump that I've had or there's the thing that doesn't quite feel right. And I probably should get the doctor to check it out before the new plan year starts. So, yeah, we absolutely do see a huge. huge bump at the end of, in Q4. Yeah, I can imagine. Kind of the story you told around, right,

like when someone is losing their hair, right, or has lost their hair and the impact that it makes in just everyday life. It's so, so true. You know, and we all maybe want to try to pretend that it doesn't, but the reality is it does. And, you know, whether, whether you're trying to present, you know, the status of a company to your board or raising money or whether you're, you know, trying to sell an idea inside your business or your, you know, your large corporation, or you're trying to sell something. I mean, it just, it impacts everything. And so it's, it's always inspiring, right, to see these, you know, people build, built companies like your, like yours, right, that have a pretty wide impact. So give us a sense for kind of where,

you know, I said earlier, we're recording this kind of in kind of, kind of Q3 of 25. Gives us a sense for where the, for someone listening maybe after the fact, give us sense where the company's at right now. Is it, yeah, you're actively commercializing? Oh, we're actively, we're commercial. We are, I'm not, I don't publicly release the stats because we certainly do have competitors, but we are at major academic. centers, private practices, community hospitals across 27 states in the United States. If you are undergoing chemo and your curious note, we're available in your area. We've got a patient, we've got an inquiry form on our website for people to check out.

We launched the product. We did our first patient enrollment June 30th of 2022. We secured our first account at the end of 2022. So, 2023 was our first true commercial year. And we've seen just crazy growth year over year. I'm really pleased to say I was able to announce earlier in July 2025 that we raised an 11 million Series A led by mutual capital partners of venture fund in Cleveland with participation by scientific health development partners in Dallas, Crescent Ridge here in San Diego,

and a bunch of California Innovation Fund and some smaller funds that have been with us along the way. So we are really at this point where we are really growing, which is exciting. And we're viewing, you know, we're looking at our business model is basically a razor razor blade model. So health systems acquire the machine that does the scalp cooling that provides the cooling therapy, but each patient needs their own capping system. And so we're just seeing huge growth month every month in recurring revenue because every patient needs their own capping system that they use for the duration of chemo. And that's, you know, those are the things that our board is really looking at for us to grow, you know, patient enrollment, recurring revenue. And I'm pleased to say,

we're really seen, we're in the midst of that hockey stick, which is really exciting. That's awesome. All of your competitors need to wear, are wearing your device just to, just to, just to cool their own heads, right? Thinking about like how they're getting warm thinking about how they're, How they can I possibly compete? But no, joke any side, that's awesome to hear. So again, coolerheads.com is the website. We'll only do it in the full write-up, but if you don't get there, coolerheads.com, and there is that locator that Kate mentioned on the site as well.

So with that said, let's maybe spend the next 20, 25 minutes. So talking about some kind of key functional aspects of startups, right, that most of us are going to have to conquer at some point in our journeys. And first one I want to talk about is something that we touched on just a second ago, right? is what sounds like kind of one of the key differentiators with your device, right? You specifically focused on not only how it looks, how it wears, right, at kind of the patient level, but how it actually fits into the workflow at an infusion center. And so maybe talk to us a little bit more about that, because I think this is one of those areas that's underappreciated, right? Sometimes

we can tend to over-engineer something. We forget maybe even about the workflow and how meaningful that is, right, to see adoption. And obviously you're doing something right here. So, you know, I guess what have you learned about this? And, you know, maybe what are some, some key things that other mettech entrepreneurs need to consider when they're trying to try to win in this area. So for us, like we are, you know, one of three devices that are cleared for this. And scalp cooling, you know, because the codes are new, like this is like scalp cooling, you know, since it came to the United States and their first competitor was got their de novo from the FDA 2015, 2016, scalp cooling has kind of been seen as the redhead of an orphan stepchild of oncology,

whereas like a Sloan Kettering, a Dana Farber will offer it. But most of infusion centers won't because of like the workflow and the patient scheduling aspects of it and nursing workload, et cetera. So, you know, I come from tech and I was able to help develop new capabilities for the United States government by even though, you know, again, my undergraduate degree is in modern European history. It's not that, you know, I have a degree in engineering, but what I'm really good at understanding is requirements and what are you actually looking to achieve. And so I spent a lot of time when I started this company, you know, I, you know, I'd never founded a company before. I'm a solo woman founder who had never been in MedTech.

And so there were not a lot of people that were banging on my door to write me a check. And so I spent the first six months talking to customers, talking to customers that were using our competitors and talking to, you know, potential customers that weren't using anything. Because I have such a strong lock on what patients want because I was the patient, right? So like I understand the patient perspective, having used a very clunky over the counter method that cost me more than $8,000. So like, yeah, like I know the patient side of it. But what do providers want? Because, you know, I look at things through the lens of what would it take to get you health system X? Like, you know, Sharp here in San Diego has been very public that they're one of our customers.

Sharp had never offered scalp cooling before. What would it take for them to go from not offering this to offering this? and really kind of digging into the details. And I think this is an example of like not knowing what you don't know, having also worked in software or not having worked in hardware. So we very much underwent the design thinking experiment. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, design thinking is a mode of product development

where you're really focused on what are the outcomes you want. Like what are the key inputs? It's not like I want it to be gray and have and look like this and do this. like what are the attributes that are the most important things? And then you just like, throw those out on a table and work with an engineering team to be like, how could we achieve these things? And so I had a very specific mindset around the use case. It had to be portable. Had to allow patients to be able to cool elsewhere. Had to be something that patients could self-adjust, had to be something that was FDA cleared. So patients and providers would value it.

And had to be, had to have a price point that wasn't, you know, the $8,000. that I spent, like had to be structured in a way that it eventually could become accretive to the health care system. And that's really where I spent the first three years when it was just me doing the Scipient task of product development for a med device. And, you know, we got our FDA clearance in October of 2021. So it was three years from three and a half years, actually, because I started the company in April, to really develop that product and really understand, like, what the key attributes are. And I'm very proud to say, what was. we have out on the market, currently right now, we've made a bunch of improvements to it,

but it fundamentally is our minimum viable product. At the end of next year, we'll be launching a new product. I'm going to be kind of hush around the features of that because this is a public, this is, you know, a public conversation. But I really dug into like what does this absolutely need to do and what is a nice to have? And I think one of the things that med, that like, especially first time founders, but anybody in Med device is like you get designed. but wouldn't it be cool if it could do all these other things? I'm like, yeah, it would be. But if it's those, you know, three to four things that a variety of customers, like, and for me, it's, you know, community health systems, academic health systems, you know, private practices, what are those

core features that they would need to see for them to get on board? And then, like, you stop. And you're just like, and it injures, but what about, like, you're like, no, like slapping their hand. Like, like, this is where we're going to focus. And the other piece of advice I have for first time, found or early stage founders, not just first time founders. I always speak of this as a first time founder because that was me is what are you proving with this first instantiation of the device? So I was approving what I'm proving with this version of the product that were equivalent to our competitors, but that we have, we have a unique use case. We have a way of using it that is highly differentiated. That's what I set out to prove. We have a bunch of other things that we're

going to start proving with the next version of the product. But I really encourage other founders to think about, like, I've talked to somebody who are like, well, I need to get a product out there. And I'm like, why? Like, what is it? Like, it doesn't matter that you've had five users. Like, I had a great conversation with somebody earlier this week who's in the oncology space and is doing something really interesting in digital health. And so she's gotten a couple of pilot customers, but I'm like, what does this prove? And, like, she hadn't thought about it that way. And so it's like, what does this prove? How is this going to allow you to really scale or, like, turn that pilot into a paid program, you know, is your digital health plate? Is that somebody that a health system will be

buying? Is it somebody you should be contracting with insurance on? Like, and really kind of thinking through, like, what is the baseline evidence that we need to get? Like, so for us to win our first account, you know, we did not need clinical data to get cleared by the FDA and anybody who knows the FDA would be able to look in our file and see that. So not, you know, and we've got clinical studies underway. We've had posters presented to ASCO. We have a lot of really great data about our efficacy. However, we needed, we did a soft launch with patients that we told them up front. You are our first patients. We are providing this to you for free. We went and we got our home medical device retailer license here in the state of California so we could legally provide them

and process the prescription. We, you know, crossed our eyes and dotted our teas and all of that good stuff. But we needed to know what we didn't know. And we needed to know that we had a strong It was working the way we expected to. There weren't software glitches out in the field. Like there was a way that we could do this in a repeatable way. And so that's what our first pilot customers were. So we could launch our first customers. And again, like UPMC has been public.

There's a bunch of news articles about our program at UPMC. You know, we won UPMC in the first six months of launching. And so, and they're a marquee customer of ours. And so like we couldn't afford to not stick the landings. on an account that important. So again, like being able to tell our investors, hey, we're doing this first cohort of patients, this is what we're going to learn, and this is what it's going to enable us. I really encourage founders to think that way. Yeah. And the way you framed it up earlier, I really like that is with your first gen design, one, go into it eyes wide open. This is a first

gen, right? And so the things that you're trying to prove or claim or differentiate on all of the kind of the features, do they ladder up to those three things, right? And kind of really framing up every decision under that umbrella, I think is really, really helpful because it is, it's very, not only is it very easy to, like, be sew in the weeds and keep adding features and to see this thing, you know, to see what this concept, you know, turned into a bit of a bloated Frankenstein, but it's hard to say no, right? It's hard to say no. I mean, you've got engineers that are excited about it, you know, and they want their, you know, their ideas incorporated, et cetera. So it's hard to say no, but the reality is like you have to say no

most of the time. Hey, everyone, let's take a quick break to talk about Fastwave Medical, the company a co-founded and lead as CEO. We're developing next generation intravascular lithotripsy systems, or IVL for short, to tackle complex calcific disease. The IVL market is valued at over $10 billion, but there's currently only one major player. In early 2023, we opened up an investment opportunity to our community, and within a month we secured close to $10 million. Then in early 24, we closed and oversubscribed $19 million round in just a few weeks, bringing the total investment into Fastwave to over $40 million. Corporate interest in the IVL space is growing too, the $900 million acquisition of Bolt Medical by Boston Scientific, and then J&J's $13 billion acquisition of

Shockwave medical signals a lot of attention towards emerging IBL startups like FastWave, and we're making some serious progress. Fastwave recently received its seventh patent for our differentiated laser IVL platform for coronary applications. On the clinical side, last year, we completed the first inhuman study of our advanced electric IVL system with some pretty compelling results. Next up in 2025, we have IDEE trials plan for both our peripheral and coronary IVL platforms. So if you're interested in investing in the fast-growing IVL market, sign up for our investor waitlist at fastwavemedical.com forward slash invest. Again, that's fastwavemedical.com forward slash invest. Now let's get back to the conversation.

No, you have to say no. And like, how are all those features going to impact your gross margin? Like, how are they going to impact your manufacture that? Manufactureability. Like I stumbled over the word because like that was such a painful part of development, right? Like I can't even say it. I like, oh. Yeah. Having some PTSD around the word. Totally.

And so, you know, like with this round, you know, with, you know, working with the team, you know, you know, our lead investor working with mutual capital partners, they would ask me, well, what about all these other things? I was like, that's for the next version of the product. That is not what we set out to prove. This is what we set out to prove. And they're like, okay, that makes sense. Yeah.

And so, like, and so, you know, founders, we always get told by investment, well, what about this? What about this? I'm like, yeah, that would be great, but we don't budget for that. And we feel it is most important for us to hit that next milestone to be able to prove, you know, one, two, and maybe three as a stretch goal. But that's all we're trying to prove. And then we need the next set of funds or the next clinical study or whatever that next thing is to enable us to get to that next point. And I will say, like, I just, I feel, you know, so fortunate that we are at this stage that now I do have the, resources to build the next version of the product because we did prove that we had product market fit. Yeah. And I think your comment really even just within the example of investors, right,

because they're going to get excited too and want you to like think about this and that and etc. But I think it's important. And my hunch is they probably, they probably respected your conviction, right, to focus on this core feature set and not get too distracted. And, you know, because you know the business better than they do, right? And so any good investors probably going to have a healthy amount of respect, even though they may maybe disagree about a few things. The reality is like you're going to know oftentimes you're going to know what's best, right, for the company. And so one other thing before we move on to kind of your Ray Clinton journey, because I do want to ask you a couple of follow-up questions there is I think kind of going back to

your comment around that you mentioned at the very kind of outset of this, you know, when you answer this question is you were patient, right? You experienced this first and foremost. But you spent six plus months like deep with patients asking questions, learning how they experienced, you know, chemotherapy, et cetera. And I think that's really important because there's probably a lot of people listening. But also and health systems and like customers because like we're B2B2C. So like, you know, Sharp and UPMC are our accounts, but they are enrolling their patients. So Sharp and UPMC are saying, we've partnered with cooler heads to provide you with scout cooling. So we take that trust incredibly seriously. And so we spend a lot of time talking to them. And you know, one of the things I would also

encourage entrepreneurs to do is I got a lot of medical oncologists as investors early on when it was early seed stage and found my way in front of them and getting them to write checks and then asking them a bunch of questions. Well, what would you want? What would your nurses want? Can I have a conversation with your head of nursing with the head of oncology at your health system and like getting them bought in that way? So then you also have leads to go to for customers when you're ready for commercialization. It's such a powerful kind of lever to pull, right? When you can get your customers, whether it's health systems and maybe in the form of venture or physicians writing angel checks so, so powerful. And I think, I mean, not that that's like radical by any stretch, but it's, you know, we recently published an interview with Joanna Nathan who mentioned something very similar, right? Like a lot of her early, like, customers that are physicians that she was around, you know, when she was kind of iterating on the concept, they ultimately, invest it, right? Which is the tell all sign, right, when someone's going to write a check at an early stage. I think that's super, super powerful. And that helped me with some of the institutional

investors that have come along the way because I was like, well, I can introduce you to X number of medical oncologists and Y number of breast surgeons that have said, this is a huge gap in care. And we think it's important. And because it's like, oh, because like scalp cooling, again, you know, had been the redheaded orphan stepchild, you know, you had to do these crazy over-the-counter things to get at work. And like, is this a thing? Like, you know, investors are always asking, like, when it's a new thing, like, is this really a thing? Is this something that health systems are actually going to do because they haven't been? Because, you know, we're not just another glucose monitoring or something in cardiac or, you know, and not that those

things aren't important, but we're saying, no, this is a blue ocean opportunity, which is, I would argue, I mean, I haven't done the other things, but I'm, I would argue, like trying to convince something, somebody that there's a market where there hasn't been traditionally, that's a steep coin. Right. And so having people on your cap table that are our, investors who would be like, hey, would you be willing to have a conversation with somebody, you know, who's considering investing about why you wrote a check and what you think is valuable and what we're doing. A question as simple as that could really be the core reason of whether or not to even pursue the project, right, or even pursue the company more rigor, right? Because if you're at,

And it's not just the question of would you, would you invest? It's actually, will you actually, will you write a check now or within the next couple weeks? And, you know, because a lot of people would say, well, yeah, I think I would, you know, but actually when the round is open, yeah, will you, will you do it? I think that's a really, really kind of tell all sign. Maybe it's not totally binary. But it's, you know, if you're, if you're striking out and you can't get any of your customers to invest in this idea, that may be a signal, you know, that you should maybe take a step back and rethink kind of what you're, what you're working on. So I think that's really, I think that's really smart Scott. And I think that, yeah, people, like, if people who are

directly in the space, like, and not everybody, you know, is a early stage investor, but there are enough, there are enough physicians and, you know, people in the health tech space that are, that are, you know, stakeholders or whether they're providers or what have you. And if they're not willing to write a check, like, you should ask why. Like, what is, what are you seeing as a barriers to being able to do that? Right, right. And to your point, even if you, even if you ask that question to why and set aside like their own personal dianatics, right? Maybe they're too early in their career. They don't have a lot of disposable income. Set that aside, like, why wouldn't they invest? That's usually going to like ladder up to some pretty interesting, you know, compelling reasons that

you may need to like think long and hard on, you know, before, where you go too far down one path. So I think that that's really healthy. Let's talk a little bit about Ray Clinic. You kind of talked about, or touched on this earlier, right? You're building off predicate devices. This was a non-clin-k. But as you think about kind of, I mean, you did a lot, though, with, I would consider kind of a lean budget, right? I think you got based on our notes, you got to 5-2K clearance, you know, roughly about a million, a little bit over a million dollars, which is pretty impressive. It was about three. So, yeah. And here's a thing, like women founders in particular, women founders raise 2% of all venture.

I'm a solo female founder that, you know, yes, I have an MBA from Stanford, but I've been working in tech, but I've been working in software. in the United States government. And there are a lot of people that were in hardware that is a med device, hardware, health tech that were like, oh, my sweet summer child, like, and not in any condescending way, but they're like, you don't know what you're doing. You have no idea how hard this is. And so really kind of finding those champions, you know, finding those medical oncologists and breast surgeons who are like, this actually is a real problem and saying, like,

you need to take all those other things out of it that I'm pursuing this in a way, where not only is this the right thing to do, but there's a way to make a lot of money solving this unmet need and just kind of keeping that mantra up is really important. Yeah, yeah, I'm going to steal that line, my sweet summer child. It's from Game of Thrones. I swear to that one. That's pretty good. But, but, you know, when you think about kind of, you know, what you've learned, right, yeah, going down this path, right? Because any, even if it's a non-clin-K, there is still a monstrous amount of work and testing that goes into any, any, any,

any submission regardless of the complexity of the device. So are there any like non-obvious things that might be helpful for other, you know, other CEOs that are staring down, whether it's a 5-2K or a de novo or even a even a class 3. Okay. So this is this is me kind of coming to public confession about the things that like the things that you didn't know. So if you haven't done this before and you are starting off on this past or this is your first time sitting in the big seat, documentation, learn everything you don't know. I knew a decent amount about quality, but we were going through our product development process during COVID. So that added another complexity to it, but really spent a lot of time understanding as you're going through the development process,

what that documentation would be and what good looks like, because we could have gotten cleared faster. We just, there were, there were questions I didn't know to ask. We got there, but the documentation, like, you'd be like, oh, the documentation, like, no, in Med Device, it is, it is for real and you do not want to bob that off and like you know when people do like strength finder you know these Meyer briggs things or what have you like i'm a big picture pull things together out of thin air i'm really comfortable dealing with complexity i hate the details and so i and i was really doing this on a shoestring budget i wish i hadn't invested more early in that in in like having that you know quality person really digging in alongside our development partner who

was great. It just, we could have moved faster if I had known where there were going to be, you know, a couple of ranks that we stepped on and smacked ourselves in the face. I don't think you're the only, I don't think you're the only CEO that doesn't necessarily like to spend time in a quality system. But joking aside, you're exactly right because even if you're even if it's not, even if it's something that you may, you may feel like you can clean up later, the reality is like oftentimes you won't get to that. It's going to be that much more expensive. No, you won't get to that. And then exactly. Like, you know, you. You know, and it's like I learned this early in my career, like even in politics, like when you hire somebody and it's not really working out and you're like, you know, we're so busy, I'll just fix it later.

It's always more painful. It's always more painful. And it's like, and there's a reason why they say hardware is hard. And like we have this internal joke at cooler heads and me and especially Nick Disher, who leads our engineering team. Like I tell them almost daily, like, oh, this is why people say don't do hardware startups. Got it. Right. Right. This is why there's like this few investors are few and far between in hardware. Yeah, oh, that's why. Yeah, yeah. But even, I mean, even if you're, even if you're, you know, potentially staring down in exit, right, in the, you know, maybe the near term, the next one to two years, that's such a big aspect for any strategic. Like, how much are they going to have to budget into remediation? Quality remediation.

Yeah, you'll clean up on aisle six. Yeah. Yeah. And it could sometimes even kill a transaction, right? If it's just too, if it raises too much risk. So, yeah, I'm glad you brought that out. So, like, we, like, with this raise, like, one of the things that like, and we have an excellent. director of quality of Sarah Hidman and her last name's about to change and I forgot what's changing

too because she's getting married shortly. But, you know, we have an awesome director of quality who has really set us up for success and we're moving to an ERP to an electronic or to an ERP EQMS system because, you know, I think for us, you know, an exit is probably 2028 to 2030. Like it's not around the corner, but like we now have a controller on board so we can get, you know, we haven't been doing audited financials. We're now a series A company. Now we will be doing that. Like, really, and, you know, I'm very proud that we've had actually excellent audits by the FDA and the California Department of Public Health where we are based, so where they've come into it inspect. Like, we have a very strong posture. But, you know, I also think back to

my time when I was working in national security. So I was responsible for our facility clearance and all of our personnel clearances. And that's the sort of thing, national security, you don't want to mess around with, like, A, because it would be detrimental to the United States if there were, you know, information that got into the hands of our adversaries, but it would also just, like, cause, like, the cancellation of your contract. So, like, I came into this company understanding that quality and documentation was important. I just wasn't fluent enough on the details as we were going through the development process. And I wish I had spent more time digging into that early. Because we just, like, rather than October, I might have been able to save a six to nine months.

Yeah. Yeah. Now, it's a good. It's a good reminder. And time is money in startup land. Yeah, yeah. I mean, even we at Fast Week, we brought on Ann and Dita, St. Gupta, gosh, when was it? It's been about a year ago now, maybe a little bit more. But I mean, like, you know, people talk about 10X engineers, like a 10X, you know, Ray quality person.

You know what I mean? It's like it's pretty dramatic when you hire the right people. And shout out to Ann and Dita, if she happens to listen to this. No, that's why I wanted to give Sarah a shout out because she's phenomenal. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Let's talk. I know we know I have a ton of time left, but I want to get to fun of. fundraising and then kind of market development slash reimbursement.

But let's talk about fundraising. This is like something that's in your warehouse, right? You mentioned that, you know, you were a finance director for, you know, on a campaign. It was like the number one target, right? It's like you had a big target on your back. You had to raise enough cash, right, to keep the, to keep your float. So when you think about how some of those skill sets kind of parlayed over to fundraising for cooler heads, talk to us a little bit about like what you know now, you know, kind of raising this,

even this most recent $11 million round. So it's actually a very similar skill set. So the way I was taught to raise money for political candidates, and I'm going to totally date myself, but I am Gen X. It's something called rollodexing. So you find somebody who's supporting your candidate and they want to help. And so then you go and whether you're doing like a Zoom meeting

or like in the old days, we used to go to the office and be like, so who do you know that for whatever reason would be supporting this member of Congress? Are they supporting legislation that's important to your industry? Is it something that you personally care about? And so I'd be asking Scott if I was, if I was, you know, back to being a finance director and you're supporting my candidate. So Scott, who are the people in your network that care about the med device legislation? My member of Congress is working on that we could invite to this thing that could write either a 250, a 500 or a thousand dollar check.

The federal maximums are higher than that right now. But that's the way that I approached it. And how do we structure that? Because these are people who probably haven't been asked before. There's a lot of people that could contribute to a political campaign, but they haven't been asked. But if like you're, you know, like you're really active in Advent and your particular, in, you know, your particular neck of the woods and there's a member Congress that's really that's really advocated for something that's important to the industry, then you would reach out

to the other CEOs and be like, look, we need this to pass. This is important for us for tariffs or what have you, you know, making sure that, you know, these components of the FDA stay strong or whatever it is. And so being able to get people who weren't, you know, previously engaged, you know, in politics getting them engaged. For fundraising, obviously, you know, venture, angel investors, they're looking at companies. But for me, it was because I was a first-time founder, new to med device, joined a ton of different programs.

So at Asthma, a program here that was, I did a cohort focused on life sciences. That put me on the map here in San Diego. I later went on to be a connect cool company here in San Diego, as well as part of MedTech Innovator, which is these are, if you're a med tech person, you know about, you know, Paul Grant and Catherine Zavala and MTI. We were MedTech innovator finalist in 2021, joined Ignite, join EFF, endless frontier labs, joined Stardex, which is for Stanford affiliated founders, and join startups really early to really grow out my network because I needed to understand who are people that write checks to Med device, who are people that would get involved early, and then who else

do I need to bring on my team to be credible? So Courtney Turik, who is our, absolute baller head of sales like, you know, global VP of sales, I brought her on right as we were commercializing because what I heard from investors is you've never sold something. Like, okay, great, it's clear by the FDA, it's all these other things. You've never sold something. So I'm like, here's a really strong commercial leader, though, who knows how to do this. And so I really look at fundraising as building relationships and every no is a not yet. And so, you know, when we had the press release about our series A, I'm writing, personal notes to VCs that got really serious and we're digging around the data room,

but for whatever reason, Medicare hadn't announced a category one codes yet, or they were waiting for the position fee schedule or just the timing wasn't right, and just keeping those relationships warm. Because I don't know if we're going to raise a series B, but I have to assume that we are and start laying the groundwork for that. And the challenge that a lot of women founders particularly have that I want to highlight as a lot of the women-focused funds that will invest very early, they have, you know, they're writing $100,000 to $500,000 checks in like, three-seed rounds. And so you always have to be thinking and asking

your early-stage investors, who else in their portfolio has gone on to raise an A or a B or on, like, who else can they help you get to who write those bigger checks? Because I'm very fortunate that we now have, we now have investors on our cap table that could lead subsequent rounds. But, you know, I didn't get founders fund. You know, I didn't get a, what are those, those $250. What are those, the scout checks? I didn't get scout checks, you know, from founders or Idrisen or all those, you know, or Sequoia early on.

So I didn't have those built-in relationships. So it was always, you know, doing accelerators, networking, going to all the events and really understanding, like, who's who in the zoo in Med Device. And I actually, this past around, I'm very pleased to say, I have venture capitalists that ultimately didn't participate in the fund, but wrote personal checks for this last round as individuals. That's cool. That's very cool. Yeah, that's a great, that's a really, really great signal. That's such an interesting, interesting point, too, because that that occurs, I think, more often than you think, right, where you've got a champion at a certain firm that really

wants to do the deal. But for a lot of different reasons, maybe they get outvoted. There's other things going on. There's other dynamics at play, but that doesn't necessarily, you know, prevent them from investing personally. Or the syndicate isn't quite right. or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, there's always a thousand reasons, but, like, those relationships pay out. Yeah. And, you know, and talking to strategics early. Like, I was just at a, I was just at an Advent met event talking to some really early founders.

And they're like, well, we don't want to talk to strategists because they don't want to steal her. I don't want them to steal our idea. I was like, guys, they don't, they're not going to. Like, they want, you know, us as the, you know, as the, you know, as the startups. They want us to solve all the problems, figure out the reimbursement, scale it in a market. and then they want to get like, you know, I've had strategics tell me to my, you know, and like, and these are great strategics that I'm building long-term relationships with being like, we don't, we don't build markets.

We don't want to do this work. We're happy to pay a premium to have you have done all this work for us. Yep. Like, and that's just the way this industry works. Oh, 100%. Yeah, yeah. It's always, I always kind of, I laugh a little bit, right, when someone says, well, we're in stealth mode. We can't, you know, we can't meet with that strategic.

It's like, be serious? No, they don't care. Like, honestly, like, yeah. But you want to get on their radar screen and then start talking and being like, you know, do they have a venture arm or do a lot of them invest off their ballot sheet? Like that's like that that is becoming increasingly common. And who are the people that you would need to to get to make that decision? And again, maybe not now, but maybe later on. And guess what?

They all talk to each other. Yeah. Yeah. You're right. I mean, we could probably spend, you know, another 20, 30 minutes talking about fundraising, especially considering you've done a thing or two in this kind of topic. But just a couple of points that I want to emphasize that you mentioned, earlier is I think all of us and everyone listening have probably been pitched by the financial advisor or the wealth kind of advisor person that you meet with and they try to sell you, you know,

long-term care insurance or life, not term life, but it's whole life, whole life. And they're like, you say no and they're like, well, can you give me five people that may want to be in interest in this? And I'm laughing, kind of joking about it, but the reality is like kind of operating under that same framework, if you already have an investor, right, that's written a pretty sizable check, they're already going to be naturally inclined to see your success, right? And so asking them, I mean, is there anyone else that like, you know, does angel investing would maybe want to, you know, hear about this? I mean, that's such an easy kind of straightforward ask, you know, from just your kind of your existing, your existing Rolodex, you know, so really, yeah, really good point.

And don't be it. And like, here's like fundraising tip 101 that I learned back when I was 22 working on political campaigns. When you make an ask, shut up. Would you write a check? Yeah. Quiet. Don't give them an out. Yeah. Let it come uncomfortable.

Have a pleasant expression on your face and make them answer you. And if the answer is, well, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, so are you saying this, this and this? So, you know, a lot of ventures, you know, led my first round. And Crystal McKellar, who is awesome as a venture capitalist, like I met her when this was like an idea and I didn't of a prototype. She led me through a bunch of things that I needed to do to get her to a point where she would invest. and not all like I'm not texting people on a weekly basis, but like every four or five months, this is where we are.

This is where we are. And it was like the second or third time that she's like, let's get on a call. Yeah. It's so, so powerful being able to like consistently communicate progress. If you're not doing that, like you should do that today. Like do that, start doing that today. If you're, you know, sitting in the, you know, a CEO seat or leadership seat, like be, you need to be communicating proactively. That never ceases to amaze me, like the CEOs that I kind of either come across

or gear of that literally will not send out an investor update. Like they've never done it. It's like, that makes me insane. So like we used to do a monthly. We now do them quarterly. So we do them like right after the end of the quarter. And like I do like I do a slide deck with a written summary, send him through Doc send because I want to know if it's reading the slide deck. Like I'm just curious because I'm nosy. But I also have a something called a stakeholder update that's like twice a year unless there's something else really, really interesting that I would want to be. And so these are VCs that have said no or keep us in mind for the next round. And it's just, it can be, you know, two or three paragraphs or it could be one or two slides.

It could just be something super simple that you just send out and be like, you know, here's a list for our media coverage. Here's our series A. Here's some of our new customers. Whatever. Here's news on reimbursement. This is where reimbursement landed for next year. Such a straightforward thing.

And it's actually just even going back to your. quarterly investor update. It's such a good practice anyway because most of the time, that's content that you're already probably presenting to the board anyway. And so to repackage that up for investors, it's like it's quite simple. And it's just, it's good, it's just good behavior, right? That as you continue to evolve, you're going to have to get more sophisticated about that anyway. So it's just good, good habits to get into. So I'm glad you brought that up. I know we're running up against the clock. Are you okay on time? Do you have a few minutes? Yeah. Okay. Before we get to the rapid fire question, the one thing I did want to touch on is, and I don't

I'm not sure if you want to answer this in respect to reimbursement, but as you mentioned, this is, this is like a newer therapy, it's not necessarily a new therapy per se, but it's newer kind of in the adoption lifecycle. Correct. Correct. Yeah, it's finally going mainstream. It's going from something like, does that really work? Is that a thing? Like, no, it's a thing. Yeah. So I guess with respect to kind of accelerating adoption, right, with it with a new, with just even though, again, it's not a brand new therapy, but it's, it's, you know, it's going to be newly adopted, I would say. Like, are there a couple things. that like you're focused on or you know you really think you need to get right you know building out building out this market i mean for us you know getting to you know after you get your first 10

customers and you've got one or two more key customers it's then having those reference accounts that you can have other customers get to and the thing that we haven't that we are toying with internally that i don't have an answer to yet but like how like what is our PR strategy so it's been totally grassroots and you know you were shouting at our website people can go to our Instagram account or LinkedIn and like her stories from patients that have used it and like why it meant something to them. But in terms of building awareness, we're now kind of entering this next stage of growth in terms of how do we make this so cancer patients know that this is that this is a thing because we need to get, you know, not only patients asking for it, but we need to, you know,

get health systems that maybe have been offering the over-the-counter method to be offering something that's FDA cleared so they can get it reimbursed. And so that's, that's, you know, the brave new world that we're operating in. You know, it's awareness and getting health systems. But again, we've got, you know, 70% of our accounts have never offered it before. And that, you know, and that number just, like, we've kind of held steady on that since the beginning. That, like, we're winning business. And previously they said, no, we can't do this.

They're like, oh, I guess now we can. But how do we keep that momentum going? Yeah, that it's kind of thinking about this rollogexing phrase that you mentioned earlier. like it kind of applies here, right? I mean, you went over a health system almost undoubtedly people, the influential decision makers in that health system or the individual infusion center probably know others, right, in their network, right? They've been to a conference or two and, you know, just asking them like, hey, is any friends

in the space that would, you know, maybe be interested in adopting this technology? Well, it's interesting that you say that because actually that just happened. So OSF, which is big health system in Illinois and Michigan, they just went public about offering AMA, you know, throughout their infusion centers and somebody who had left OSF, but, you know, was good friends with the head of oncology there, who's now at a different health system in Chicago, reached out to me via LinkedIn and be like, hey, I'd really like to learn more about this. I didn't know it was available now in that form factor. So, you know, those LinkedIn posts, like, even like that stuff, like, it works. Like, I think we're going to have them as an account

by the end of the year, like, which is great. Like, that's what we want. It's good stuff. All right. Let's get to the rapid fire portion of this interview because I know we're a little bit over and I want to be sensitive to it to your schedule here. But again, for everyone listening, coolerheads.com, just as it sounds, coolerheads.com, C-O-O-L-E-R-Hads.com, Coolerheads.com. Rapid fire questions are rapid fire in nature.

Feel free to expand a little bit if you want, Kate. But first one, first one, fast forward to a year from now, right? Take us to mid-20206. What are you most excited about over that, over at that period in time? I am most excited about patients who previously felt that they couldn't afford it getting it paid for by insurance. Like I'm I'm looking forward to the reorders of our health systems that are like we need more machines. Yeah, that's cool.

All right. Since co-founding the company, you know, back in 2018, what's the most... What's the most surprising or maybe unexpected thing that you've learned? The founders are your best friend. Other founders have got your back will help you. I am here because founders that were, you know, series A when I was pre-seed, or what have you. And now it's, you know, founders that are a series CD or have exited before that are

helping me now. Founders are so collaborative and will go out of their way to help you. And like there's a couple of people that I can think of back when I was negotiating a term sheet, you know, some people who I really respect who are incredibly well known in the industry, who I've met like once or twice, email them late at night, kind of like, just like, oh, what do I do? And being like, let's get on the phone 15 minutes tomorrow morning. like founders have your back and build a community of them.

Yeah, that's cool. All right, I'm going to combine kind of the last two questions here because I know we're over, but let's say we are, you know, we're in beautiful San Diego, Southern California. We maybe, you know, just got finished up with dinner with a bunch of other med tech entrepreneurs. What's the one thing that you think they need to understand that maybe you wished you knew, you know, in your, you know, call it late, late 20s, early 30s, that kind of timeframe.

I think that they need to know that you need to be humble. enough to not have all the answers. And you need to be able to surround yourself with people that know what they're doing and to let them do it. Good way to wrap up the interview. Kate, I'll have you hold on the line. But thanks again for covering out some time to do this. This has been great. Awesome. I really enjoyed the conversation, Scott. Thanks so much for the opportunity. Likewise, you shared a lot of gems. And so I'm hopeful that this will reach a lot of people. But for everyone listening, Coolerheads.com. We'll link to it in the full write-up on Medsider. If you're new to Medsider, I highly encourage you to check out those write-ups. They do a nice job of kind of

summarizing a lot of the key learnings that are guests share, including a lot of the phenomenal lessons learned that Kate talked to us about over the last hour or so. So highly encourages you to check that out. We'll also link to Kate's LinkedIn profile as well on that full write-up. But you made it this far. Thanks for your attention, 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 startup. But here's the thing. I'd be super grateful if you could help me reach even more ambitious doers who share our passion.

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