Medsider: Learn from Medtech and Healthtech Founders and CEOs - The Hard Truth About Partnerships: Interview with Vivos CEO Kirk Huntsman

Episode Date: April 2, 2025

In this episode of Medsider Radio, we sat down with Kirk Huntsman, CEO of Vivos, a company commercializing a non-invasive, FDA-cleared oral appliance designed to treat obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). Kirk is a seasoned healthcare entrepreneur with a track record for scaling and exiting successful businesses. He founded Dental One, growing it into one of the largest dental service organizations (DSO) in the U.S., with over 165 practices across 15 states. After selling the company to MSD Capital, he led ReachOut Healthcare America, a Morgan Stanley Private Equity portfolio company. He later built and exited Xenith Practices, another DSO, and founded Ortho Ventures, focusing on pediatric oral appliances. Now as CEO of Vivos, Kirk and his team are developing and commercializing proprietary treatments for sleep-related breathing disorders, offering patients an FDA-cleared alternative to CPAP therapy.In this interview, Kirk talks about his go-to-market strategy, the importance of credibility markers, the complexity of industry partnerships, and the challenges he faced pursuing an IPO.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 Kirk Huntsman.

Pick your partners wisely and make sure that you have people that you can believe in and people who are going to be, they're going to be with you through thick and thin. If you have a bad partner, no contract will save you. I don't care what it is. No contract's going to save you. And if you have a good partner, the worst contract's never going to be a problem. 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 Kirk Huntsman, CEO of Vivos.

Kirk is a seasoned healthcare entrepreneur with a track record for scaling and exiting successful business. He founded Dental One, growing it to one of the largest dental service organizations or DSOs in the U.S. with over 165 practices across 15 states. After selling the company to MSD Capital, he then led Reach Out Healthcare America, a Morgan Stanley private equity portfolio company. He later built and exited Zenith practices, another DSL, and then founded Ortho Ventures focusing on pediatric oral appliances. Now as CEO of VIVOS, Kirk and his team are developing and commercializing proprietary treatments for sleep-related breathing disorders, offering patients and FDA cleared, alternative to CPAP therapy. Here for you the key things that we discussed in this conversation. First, as a CEO, understanding both the technical and business aspects of your industry is essential. FDA approval backed by solid research builds credibility with physicians and strengthens reimbursement

conversations. It's also critical to choose distribution partner strategically. Meeting patients at their diagnosis point can prove to be more effective than pursuing broad deals with major corporations. Second, even with a proven solution, adoption takes time. Experts stick to what they know, especially in highly regulated fields like healthcare. Leverage credibility markers to expand adoption as industry trust doesn't come from claims alone. Regulatory approvals, endorsements from leading institutions and real-world success stories from patients and physicians make it easier to gain traction. Third, secure the right funding for your stage.

Private funding offers flexibility that public markets don't. If possible, stay private until your business model is mature. going public comes with investor expectations, quarterly scrutiny, and limited room for trial and error. It can create more stress than opportunity if you can't accurately forecast revenue and show consistent growth. All right, before we 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 Christine Surgical, Don Crawford, co-founder of Safion and current CEO of Corvista Health and other proven medtech founders and CEOs. Look, we get it. Keeping up with every Medsider interview isn't easy. That's why we created Medsider mentors. These ebook 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 Medsider Radio.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 BCs, 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 in in the interview. All right, Kirk, welcome to Medsider Radio. Appreciate you covering out a little bit of time during the holiday season to record an interview on your journey, and especially as it relates to Vivos. I'm glad to be here. Thanks for having me. Yeah, well, I recorded a very short bio at the outset of this particular episode. But let's start there.

If you can kind of give us a, you know, two-minute snapshot of your kind of your professional journey leading up to running VVos as CEO, that'd be great. Sure. Sure. I've been in health care for over 40 years. I'm mostly in the dental side of things, but now that I've had VVos here, we're firmly planted in the medical side of things. Obstructive sleep apnea is obviously it's a medical condition.

are the devices that we use actually have their roots in dentistry, their oral appliances. So it's a little bit of a crossover. But my career has been, you know, I was one of the very first started, one of the very first groups that became the DSO business, which is dental support or dental service organizations. It's now a multi-billion dollar industry where it's basically the roll-up of professional dental. practices. And so I was one of the first to do that back in the early to mid-1990s. And then it just sort of evolved from there. I had a nice run with that. And when I exited from that, I'm a little bit of a serial entrepreneur. And so I kept going and doing things. I just couldn't sit around and do nothing. So I just, I kept going and I came across this technology using oral appliances to actually

treat obstructive sleep apnea. And I became just infatuated with the good that we could do in that respect. And it just one thing sort of led to another. We had some unique proprietary technologies that that we think are important and an important addition to the state of the art. And so, you know, I have my best. background is finance. I read so many clinical studies and scientific papers and whatnot that I feel like I feel like I've earned a secondary degree in medicine or biology or something, but I do feel like

I have a grasp of both the clinical as well as the business, you know, aspects of this. And I think that's important for a CEO to have, you know, just especially in health care. You got to really understand what you're doing and how it fits in the greater scheme of things and what we bring to the table for patients and for providers. So that's probably my story. I mean, other than that, I'm a typical guy married for 45 years with four kids and I don't know how many. I think I have nine grandkids now. So, yeah, so we're just very blessed and love what I do with this here at VVos and love the impact that we're making on this disease. You're being humble with your career.

I mean, it's pretty impressive. And we'll link to Kirk's LinkedIn profile. You can check out his background a little bit more detail in the show notes and full write-up for this particular conversation. But it's you, BYU, right? I mean, joking aside, it's like whenever I notice someone's from BYU, I'm always like, there's something there, there's some fire there. You know what I mean?

It'd be a BYU fan after the whooping we just put on to Colorado. No kidding. Colorado, living in Colorado here, it's just even more sweet because a lot of smack talk that was going on before last Saturday. And it's just a lot of fun right now. Yeah, I know. Definitely an impressive performance, for sure. So with that said, Vivos.

I'm on the website now. We'll link to it as well in the full write-up on my newsletter. But it's VVOS, just as it sounds, VIVOS.com. You mentioned sleep apnea a couple times now. I think that's what probably most surprised, may surprise a lot of people that are overly familiar with sleep apnea, they've probably heard of it, but don't realize that a lot of, a lot of this, the underlying issues do relate to like the oral sort of cavity, right, that drives a lot of this, the conditions associated with sleep apnea. So give us a sense for kind of your device

at VEVOS, what sets it apart. Why is it different, right? As it pertains to, you know, to treating this condition. Well, if I may, let me just give the audience a little bit of an overview on sleep apnea itself because there are a lot of, there are a lot of stereotypes out there about who is impacted by sleep apnea. And, you know, we've only known and identified this condition for about 60 years. It was only in the mid-1960s that sleep apnea as a medical condition really appeared in the medical literature. And people started really sitting up and paying attention to it.

And before that, it was a bit of a joke. It was, they actually used to call it, Pickwickian syndrome after a character in Charles Darwin's novel or Charles Dickens novels. And so it's actually something that we're still learning a lot about. And I think people need to understand that this stereotype of this disease being a disease of, let's just say, middle-aged, overweight, you know, Uncle Bob type people is really not. it at all. I mean, this disease now affects their, they project or estimate, rather, that it affects over a billion people on this planet. So you figure one out of eight people walking

around have this. Here in the United States, it's probably even higher. And so we're sitting here with this, you know, this condition. And what we're really talking about, an apnea, so people need to understand that an apnea is where your airway closes. And you cannot, you cannot aspirate, the air you need to survive. So when your airway collapses like a, I know, you're kind of young. You're a lot younger than I am, but they're coming back because of some of the environmental concerns,

but the paper straws, right? So when I was a kid, all we had were paper straws, and you'd have one in your milkshake, and you'd try to suck through it. The harder you would try to get that ice cream up the straw, the more it was going to collapse on you. So you had this dance with your straw. And really, that's really.

really what happens here is when the airway collapses, you cannot, you cannot bring in the air that you need, and this can last for, you know, it can last for some time. And so if it lasts at least 10 seconds, it becomes an apnea event that gets counted towards an index where they just count the number of apneas and hypophanias, which is where you get some blood oxygen desaturation. And what happens is that if that number adds up where you have, you know, 30 events in an hour, you've got severe sleep apnea. Well, there's a lot of people out there that have problems with that. And they're not all fat.

And they're not all men. And they're not all middle age. This actually affects children as young as two and three years old. In fact, infants come, sometimes they come right out of the wound. And they're unable to nurse. And they're unable to because they have high arched, and they have underdeveloped jaws and they have tongue ties where they can't latch on to the breast to suckle properly. And so you have all these issues from the earliest stages of life.

And as we learn more and more about this condition, we learn that this is something that affects our children and their health. It affects thin people. It affects people that obviously affects those who are overweight, but it affects all ethnicities, both genders, it affects people all the way up until their late 80s. And some people live with this condition their entire life. And they don't know it because they sleep through it. And unless they have a very active bed partner who gives them the elbow and says, you know, look, dude, you got to do something about that.

You stop breathing at night. You gas for air at night. You snore like a chimney. All these things that gets us motivated to go out and find out what's going on, then we really, it's a problem with how. we think about this as a society. So what the research has done over the last, especially the last 20, 30 years, the research has said, whoa, this is really, this is not just about something that happens, snoring or, you know, something rather innocuous. This is about the deprivation of

oxygen and CO2 and other things that are messing with our endocrine system, our hormones, our cardiovascular health, our brain function, our mental health, our physical well-being, our energy levels throughout the day. So into that fray, about 40 years ago, a guy out of Australia, can't remember his name right now, but he created the CPAP device. And so you have your first attempt, or the first real successful attempt to sort of manage this disease. And that that's really what it was. The CPAP machine is not a tool to cure or fix sleep apnea. It's a tool to actually manage the disease state. And so if you were diagnosed with sleep apnea, you would be given 95% of the time. You're going to be given a CPAP machine. And that CPAP machine is something that

you're going to be told. You need to wear this every night for the rest of your life all night long. and it's like well that is the last thing i want to do is to you know wear this darts vater mask in the bedroom and look like a dork and all those kinds of things right and so people don't want to wear that but that's been the only go-to first-line treatment gold standard solution for medicine for 40 over 40 years and think about that in every other aspect of life we've seen amazing technological. I mean, think about computers and everything else that's happened over the last 40 years. And the advance of technology has been amazing.

And yet with obstructive sleep apnea, we're effectively using the same type of solution today that came about 40 years ago. So you asked me, and I'm sorry for the long-winded response, but I kind of warned you about that. But what you asked me about, so VVos comes to the table with sort of this oral appliance. Well, about 20, 25 years ago, dentists realized that they could actually open the airway by moving the mandible forward. So they created these mandibular advancement oral appliances to just mechanically reposition the lower jaw. And when you move the tongue and the, you know, when you move that lower jaw forward, the tongue comes with it. So the airway behind it just opens right up. and it's less prone to collapse when you lay down at night to sleep.

And so the dentistry just got all excited about it and said, man, we have the solution here. And we are the ones that have the ability to, we're the ones that have the ability to really make some headway here. But the physicians were just like, you know what, we got this. We don't need dentists stepping into our turf. We got this. And, you know, I get that, right?

They've got their own way of doing things. and dentists, you know, they had their own incentives and, you know, the coordination between the dental care and the medical condition were just awkward at best. And so, so dentistry's never really picked up and it's not gained a tremendous amount of traction. So today, we still see CPAP being the leading solution here. So what happens? VEVos comes along, and this technology has been around for about 15 years. I came on to the scene about eight or nine years ago, met the inventor met the creators of this and paid a lot of money to these guys to get control of this thing and formed VVos and and we we've been we know we launched and and we have been you know we're a

public company now and we've been you know up and down with that whole thing which is a whole story but but we we have actually brought to market the world's first ability to actually resolve OSA. So rather than managing it every night for life, if somebody says, what's the difference in VVos? Well, with our oral appliance technology, we can actually put a patient into treatment and then nine to 12 months later bring them out of treatment and they're done. So we've positioned their upper and lower jaws made a bigger, more patent airway that's not prone to collapse and we get really good results. Now, we don't cure everybody, right? We don't, and we're not even allowed to say that we cure anybody, but we do make a huge difference with a

bigger airway, more patent airway where it's not, it's not so prone to collapse when people lay down. And then people are done. So a guy like you, which is, when you look like you're maybe in your mid-30s, early 40s, something like that, I don't know where you are, but I mean, we treat a lot of guys like you, believe it or not. And they don't look any different. different, right? They're young, they're healthy looking, they're, you know, they're vibrant and all this, but they come to us desperate for help because they really, they don't want to wear a CPAP. They don't want to go down that path and nobody's giving them any other solutions. And so I think what's happening is that technology, and particularly our technology, is actually, it's actually

creating an alternative path for treatment that gives patient's, you know, optionality. Got it. That's what we're doing. Yeah. Yeah. If you're listening to this and you're like, this is, this is right at my alley, my partner, my spouse, or my, my spouse, you know, does the, does the elbow in the ribs at night because of the snoring issue, there's a, you know, Vos.com, for it's last patience. Actually, there's like the, it looks like a kind of a, a simple, like, four-step kind of approach, right? That is, that is part of the Vos plan. And so, As a follow-up, kind of before we kind of go back in time and learn a little bit a little bit more about your journey and then VVos specifically.

Who, like, what, which specialty is involved in the VVos? I mean, is it dentists that are primarily kind of, you know, that's a great question. Is it, is it, yeah, is it sleep doctors? Where do you go, right? Who do you call? Right? The old, the old Ghostbusters thing, who are you going to call? Well, so our first, you know, my background, as I mentioned at the beginning.

into the podcast here is my background is in dentistry. My team, I just handpicked my senior management people from people that I'd been with in other ventures and doing other things. And most of our backgrounds have been in the dental space. It felt natural to us because we did have an oral appliance device. It felt natural for us to go after the dentist. What we've learned over the last eight years, though, is that dentists are preoccupied with dental things. And they're not really comfortable either treating or assisting patients with obstructive sleep apnea. It feels for a lot of them, of the vast majority, it just feels like it's outside the scope of what they were trained to do, what their expertise is in, and blah, blah, blah.

So we've pivoted in the last couple of years. We've really made a very important, very conscious pivot to really take our message to the medical community directly. and also via social media to take it to the patients who might be out there. So, and really, to the credit of the medical profession, the reception has been amazing. And I think part of that is that we came to them with a highly differentiated product, right? We weren't coming. There's over 200 oral appliance devices out on the market.

Every one of them does exactly the same thing. And so when we come along and knock on their door, and say, well, wait a minute, we're not like any of those. And we have FDA clearances that for severe sleep apnea that no other oral device has. We have clearances to treat children that no other oral device has. And all of a sudden, the medical guys are like, oh, my gosh, you mean there's an alternative to CPAP because my patients hate it. And if I could give them an alternative, I would look like a hero, as long as this stuff works.

And then we go back to the FDA clearances and the research that we've done. We work closely with Stanford University. And I was out there a couple weeks back, meeting with Dr. Kleeke Kusheeda, who's the top researcher in the world on obstructive sleep apnea. He's really the head of the sleep research lab there at Stanford. And Dr. Koshita, he chairs our clinical advisory board. I mean, we have the top of the top and the best of the best. So what we're doing is we're sort of going to the very best and brightest in medicine

and getting those guys to put their stamp of approval, if you will. They don't really go that far. But actually to just say, hey, this is, this looks like it'll work. It's an alternative and it's viable and it's got all the regulatory clearances. And, you know, this is worth trying. And so, so, but our experience with patients is just off the charts. So where we are in that journey is just, you know, we're kind of at the point where we've now published in the medical journals, the research that's needed to validate and verify and corroborate what we've been saying. And now the medical profession is accepting of it.

And when we sit down with patients and we lay out their options for treatment, eight out of ten of them pick our device. and they got to pay more for them. Our cost of treatment is more expensive than a CPAP machine, but it actually gets the job done. And people like the idea that, hey, I can make this better. I can do that in about a year, and I don't have to mess with this the rest of my life. I like that.

And if it costs me a little bit of money out of pocket, hey, that's not so bad. That's not the worst thing in the world, because we're talking about my ability to breathe, right? And we're talking about my risk of cancer and my risk of diabetes and my risk of a heart attack and aphib and stroke and I mean, you can go out down the list and it's just like a who's who of ways to die when you look at all the things that sleep apnea either causes or makes worse. So yeah. Yeah. And you started the company

about eight years ago, I think right back in 16ish, something like that. 2016. Company with pub. Go ahead. No, I was just going to say I met the, I met, I met, I had a a technology for kids that I already had at the time. I'd found that in 2013, 2014. And I was coming to market with this technology for kids. Then I discovered this patented technology that was really more advanced and more sophisticated. And I met the guy that had created it. But he was a, you know, he was a clinical guy. He was a professor guy. He was not a business guy. I was never going to scale this up. So I bought the technology from him. We formed Vivo therapeutics. we raised a bunch of money privately from friends and family and all that sort of thing.

And then in 2020, we took it public. Okay. So 2020 was when you IP at the company. Yeah, it was actually December 20th of 2020. So I mean, we just had our, what is it, our third birthday, fourth birthday as a public company. So we're excited where we've been. Got it. And are you primarily focused on the U.S. then?

Or are you commercializing this globally? Well, you know, it's interesting. What happens is that these. guys talk. I mean, people go online and they see what people are doing, they hear about it. I have providers literally all over the world. I have providers in Moscow, Russia, I have providers in South Africa, I have providers in Australia, I have providers in Europe, I have providers in Canada. You know, the one place I don't have anybody yet is really South America. And I don't know, you know, I don't know why that is yet, but Brazil and all those, there's a lot of people down

there that have this, of course, but I don't have anybody yet in South America. But, you know, and the rest of the world, yeah, we have, and nobody in China, obviously, but we really have a pretty good coverage in a lot of different places. Got it. Got it. Well, cool. Let's spend the next 20, 30 minutes kind of going back in time. And I'd like to start actually with financing, right? Because you've got a fair amount of experience, right? Raising capital to fund various ventures. You've had, you know, a couple like because it's under your belt. You bought this particular technology to really scale it up. So when you think about raising capital, you made the decision to IPO VVos, right? But you funded other ventures in alternative fashion. And so when you think, you know, if you

had a couple pieces of advice to other, you know, med tech or, you know, life science entrepreneurs that are either maybe like maybe first time fundraising or maybe have done a little bit of it that are, you know, looking to kind of level up their financing, you know, the fundraising game, so to speak, Right. What kind of words of wisdom would you whisper in their ear? Fundamentally, I would say, slow is fast. You know, there's a tendency when you have what you believe to be a world-beating technology. You want to go to market. You want to get out there. You want to do all these things. And I would say, take it slow. Don't, don't assume anything until you build your model.

You've got to have your model right. You've got to have your channels of distribution and all the things that are necessary. you've got to, and those take time to put into place. It also takes money. And I, you know, I would just say raising money privately is, I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. It is that hard. And, you know, I mean, it's, especially in today, over the last four or five years, it's been a lot harder. One of the reasons we went public is that we were kind of running out of options to, to do this. COVID, put a train wreck on a lot of capital, investing and especially for microcap, small, you know, type venture type things. And if I had to do it over again, I probably would go a little bit different route. I mean, we put a lot of friends and family money, personal funds and all that sort of thing up. And you got to do that. You just, there's no getting around that. You have to get your angel investors in. And then you have to just sort of, you know, get it to the right point. If I had had really, really, good private

private equity funding or you know things like that at the time I probably wouldn't have taken the company public but being a public has been a mixed blessing right so it's given me access to a lot more capital but it's also been it hasn't exactly been

it's not a journey that I would recommend I mean it's maybe at some point when you're seasoned and you're, you know, but when you're trying to play the public company game at the same time that you're trying to build market share and build credibility and do research and development and get regulatory approvals and, I mean, there's a lot of things that are that are really milestones that have to be kind of done. And when you're trying to do all that simultaneously, it's hard. It's just really hard. And so it's not for the faint of heart. It's not for people that. you know, you got to have, you got to have an endurance mindset because it's not going to happen quickly. It takes time. And so my advice would be always assume that it's going to take two or three times as long to get to where you think you're going to be and two or three times or ten times as much money. And that's a little cliche. I understand that. But having done this more than once now,

some with some nice success associated with it and some where it literally we've hit the wall in 100 miles an hour and it's, you know, all of it is painful. There is a, there is a, you know, we're starting to feel right now at VVos for the very first time that we have got this thing figured out and we've really, we're really on top of it now. We have the regulatory approvals. We have the confidence of FDA. We have the universities doing the research and everybody's, realizing, hey, this stuff is real and it really works. And it's really, you know, it's what these guys have said it is. And now we've got, now we're, now it's about executing on a go-to-market strategy

that will optimize market share and take this thing to a billion dollars. I think we really have that, that upside potential. But, you know, just, just the warning out there, the caveat is, you know, don't, no, there's an old song, I think it's, this goes, this goes beyond your day, but back in my day, there was a rock group called America. They had a song, don't cross the river if you can't swim the tide, right? So it's kind of that, don't jump in the river and attempt to swim to the other side unless you've got, unless you've got what it takes to get to this side because it's a, it is a, it's a, it's a, it's a struggle, right? Yeah. So the reason that kind of, your answer stands out, especially around, you know,

the decision to IPO, right? Like, you've been around the block, right? You've had some really nice wins. This is not, you're not new to the game of like building and scaling companies. For the, for, you know, if, like, maybe there's a little bit of an IPO window, you know, opening up over the next, you know, a couple years and, you know, some CEOs that are listening to this are kind of, you know, maybe giving that a little bit more consideration than they otherwise would have. It sounds like what's been the, you know, it's a sort of cuts both ways, right? but what's one of the most difficult things about the IPO process for VBOs is just, it sounds like it's just, it's one more almost distraction from the key milestones that

your company used to execute. Is that kind of how you'd sort of paint that, you know, paint that brush, so to speak. I think that's a fair characterization. I mean, you got to have a good, you got to have a good bench, right? So, I mean, I have to wear a lot of hats and we're still a microcap, right? I mean, our revenues are still, you know, in the scheme of things, are still not where we're making a whole lot of noise in the grander picture. But the moment you become a public company, people have eyes on you and they have expectations and be careful what you promise, never over promise. I mean, I'm four years into being a public company and we've never once set targets

or expectations for, you know, what the next quarter or the next six months, the next year would be, where we're always very cautious about what kind of expectations that we do set. And it's frustrating for Wall Street because they're used to having a certain amount of predictability and did you hit your numbers and why didn't you or why did you or, you know, where are you in the stream of things? And you're constantly every quarter trying to live up to that. When you're funded by a venture capital firm or a private equity group, you're really, they have the same kinds of expectations, but they also get the fact that as a private enterprise, it requires some seasoning. There is no concept of seasoning in the public markets. And so that's why I said, if your company is to the point in its evolution where you have your model figured out, your distribution in place, and what you can do is predict what's going to happen in three months and six months and 12 months, if you have that ability to do that consistently and you feel like you might be, you know, you might be ready to do that.

There are positives and benefits, but if you don't, you're going to play the same song and dance that we play here at Vivo's every quarter, which is, man, this is going great, this is happening, but we're not there yet. And, you know, we're expected to happen, you know, 2025, right? So that's our, that's our mantra right now. And that's the best we can do. But yeah. Yeah, that's good stuff. Let's, let's transition to talking a little bit more about partnerships, right, in collaborations. with key, you know, with key allies, so to speak. You've got a ton of experience, you know, even on the, on the dental side previously, leading up to VVos, but even at VVos, you've been able to secure some notable partnerships. I think LNCare being one of them, GM instruments, Ormco, etc.

So it seems like you can have a knack for this, right, knowing how to, like, how to align, you know, with sort of like-minded entities that are going to win, right, along with, you know, the company that you're building, too. So when you think about some, you know, whether it's how to identify the right partners or even securing those types of those types of relationships, you know, what are a few things that either you feel like you've really done right or maybe some hard lessons that you learn that now you're, you know, you're implementing successfully. Yeah, that's a great question. I don't get that question very often, but it's a great one. You know, look, anytime you want to take your company, if you're a microcap, you're a startup, you're your early stages of your, of your, of your. your sort of evolutionary growth, you've got to partner with people that can actually lift you, take you to the next level.

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