Medsider: Learn from Medtech and Healthtech Founders and CEOs - Tried-and-True Recipes for Success: Interview with IRRAS CEO Will Martin

Episode Date: May 17, 2023

In this episode of Medsider Radio, we sat down with Will Martin, CEO of IRRAS, a company revolutionizing the treatment of intracranial bleeding.Will is an accomplished executive with over two decades of hands-on experience in the medtech arena, including roles at Boston Scientific, Access Closure, Hotspur Technologies, and Athromed. Will's expertise in sales and marketing leadership propelled him to become the CEO of IRRAS. His contributions to startups and established strategics have solidified his reputation as a proven leader in the medical device space.In this interview, Will shares his insights on understanding user needs and cultivating strong internal relationships while maintaining robust quality management systems.Before we jump into the conversation, I wanted to mention a few things:If you’re into learning from proven medtech and health tech leaders and want to know when new content and interviews go live, head over to Medsider.com and sign up for our free newsletter. You’ll get access to gated articles, and lots of other interesting healthcare content.Second, if you want even more inside info from proven experts, think about a Medsider premium membership. We talk to experienced life science leaders about the nuts and bolts of running a business and bringing products to market.This is your place for valuable knowledge on specific topics like seed funding, prototyping, insurance reimbursement, and positioning a medtech startup for an exit.In addition to the entire back catalog of Medsider interviews over the past decade, premium members get a copy of every volume of Medsider Mentors at no additional cost. If you’re interested, go to medsider.com/subscribe to learn more.

Every company is different. Every timeline is different. Every pool of available capital is drastically different. But investing in your brand awareness and your thought leader engagement early on is ultimately the most important thing. Welcome to MedSider Radio, where you can learn from proven med tech and healthcare thought leaders through uncut and unedited interviews. Now, here's your host. host, Scott Nelson. Hey, everyone, it's Scott.

In this episode of MedSider, I sat down with Will Martin, CEO of ERIS. He's an accomplished executive with over two decades of hands-on experience in the med tech arena, including roles at Boston Scientific, Access Closure, Hotspur Technologies, and Athromed Med. Will's experience in sales and marketing leadership propelled him to become the CEO of ERIS, where his team is revolutionizing the treatment of intracranial bleeding. His contributions to startups and established companies have solidified his reputation as a proven leader in the medical device space.

Here for you the key things that we discussed in this conversation. First, go the extra mile in meeting users' needs by considering every faucet of their experience. Two, establishing solid, genuine relationships with customers and influential thought leaders is one of the best things you can do for your company. Third, keep your eye on the ball when it comes to quality management, which will ensure your company is ready for a successful M&A event. Before we jump into this episode, I wanted to let you know that we recently released the second volume of Medsider Mentors. which summarizes the key learnings from the most popular Medsider interviews over the last six months or so. Look, it's tough to listen or read every single MedSider interview that comes out, even the best ones. But there are so many valuable lessons you can glean from the founders and CEOs that join our program.

So that's why we decided to create MedSider Mentors. It's the easiest way for you to learn from the world's best medical device and health technology entrepreneurs in one central place. If you're interested in learning more, head over to MedsiderRadio.com forward slash mentors. Premium members get free access to all past and future. volumes. If you're not a premium member yet, you should definitely consider signing up. In addition to every volume of Medsider mentors, you'll get full access to the entire library of interviews dating back to 2010. This includes conversations with experts like Erica Rogers, CEO of Silk Road Medical, Dr. David Albert, founder of Alivecore, and so many others.

In addition, as a premium member, you'll get to join live interviews with these incredible med tech and health tech entrepreneurs. Learn more by visiting medsiderradio.com forward slash mentors. Again, that's medsiderradio.com forward slash mentors. All right, Mr. Will Martin, we've known each other, I think, for quite some time. And I've been looking forward to recording a conversation with you for Medsider for, I don't know, I can't remember. Too long, but proud to have you on the program. Thanks for coming on. Really looking forward to this discussion. It's great to be here. I remember back in the day as you were kicking off everything with Medsider

and it's really been fun and exciting to watch from the sidelines to see all of the exciting and and content you put out, and I'm glad to play a small role in it. Yeah, and I remember, I think maybe when I first maybe reached out, we first kind of got to know each other. I always said a viewed almost like your career, almost like, I kind of want to do what that guy's doing, right? You know, and this was, gosh, probably 10, 15 years ago now, but you've been with, you've had so many interesting stories, right, with all of the startups that you've been a part of, and now, you know, in your, in your, your, your, your, uh, your willa CEO of leading ERIS, if I can make sure I pronounce that correctly. But yeah, I think I think this would just be a really fun conversation to go kind of

back in time, learn from, you know, maybe your successes, maybe some failures along the way and, you know, excited to kind of learn what you're building at ERIS too. So with that said, I provided kind of a high level overview of your bio at the outset of this conversation. Let's hear it from you first. So can you give us a sense, but maybe not without going kind of company by company per se, but like give us a sense for your professional background before taking on the CEO role of ERIS. Yeah, I started in the world of medical devices to some degree out of sheer necessity. I got out of the military, I got out of business school and took a job in product management in the fiber optic telecommunications world. And when the internet bubble burst in the early 2000s, that world exploded.

And I ended up in the world of medical sales. And fortunately landed on my feet at Boston Scientific, which is a great place to cut your teeth. it's a great place to get trained. And that was a phenomenal launching point for everything that's come from that point forward. I had a good fortune of being introduced to an early stage startup opportunity at a company called Access Closure in 2007. It was one of the first four members of the commercial field sales team there. And that group headed by Leslie Trigg and Fred Koshravi and in conjunction with many others

who've been successful in early stage devices, it opened up a whole different world for me. I was exposed to what it was like to join a pre-commercial company. I was exposed to what was like to build a new technology and a new franchise from scratch and get your hands involved in every aspect of the business. And for me, it's like the light switch turned on. I'm like, oh, I can influence so many different aspects of the business beyond just customer relationships. And everything's taken off from there.

I had the good fortune of being part of that exponential revenue growth for access closure, stepped over. And when you and I first met each other at Hotspur Technologies, one of the sister companies within the incubator, took on my first sales and marketing leadership role, had a handful of other successful startups that reached the finish line since that point. And about five years ago, I decided to walk away from cardiovascular and jump into the deep end of the neurosurgical, neurocritical care pool as the chief commercial officer for ERIS. And ever since, we've been trying to revolutionize how patients with intracranial bleeding are

being treated. And it's been one heck of a ride each step along the way. Yeah, no doubt. I'm looking at these companies, right? You mentioned a couple of them, Hotspur, who I think we both got to know Gwen Watsnabi. Yes. I loosely got to know her, but obviously you worked, you know, really, really closely with her. You mentioned some of the Leslie Trigg, Fred Krasavia, at access closure, then your time at Anthromed, which then sold the fillups, which we'll get into in more detail. I mean, it's like, you know, company after company. And I think time permitting, I'd love to kind of go back and learn, you know, about that transition

from Boston to the first startup. Because I think there's so many people that listen to this podcast that are at a strategic, right? And are like, that startup game kind of seems really fun and either want to make the leap or don't know how to do it, et cetera. So hopefully we'll have time. to kind of dig back into that topic. But with that said, let's set the stage for ERIS, though, because I want to get a sense for like what you're, you've been at the company for, you know,

about five years you mentioned. Give us a sense for kind of what, what you're doing, like, and how the, how this maybe the technology, you know, came to be. It's crazy when you think of the world of stroke. So much innovation has occurred in the past 10 to 15 years in chasing blood clot deep into the brain and folks who walk into a hospital or are brought to a hospital via ambulance after having an ischemic stroke, which is a blockage of blood flow to the brain, essentially a heart attack for the brain. Within a matter of minutes, that clock can be extracted, blood flow can be resumed, and everybody hears the phrase time is brain. And that patient can very quickly return to a normal life, more so than ever has been the case in the history of mankind.

Now, if you take the other side of stroke, hemorrhagic stroke, which is active bleeding in the brain where a vessel ruptures or there's traumatic brain injury, there's been no such innovation. It was 15% of total stroke volume, but somewhere approaching 50% of total stroke death because the way that these patients are treated, same basic concept that was first theorized 250 plus years ago. So same basic technology has been on the market for 40 plus years. If you fall and hit your head on the sidewalk outside, they're going to use a handheld twist drill to gain access to your brain, put in a basic one-directional passive drainage catheter to allow excess blood to be drained. And you're going to wait and see if the enzymes of the body can break down the blood fast enough while you still have some normal functioning brain activity. And for us at ERIS, we're trying to

revolutionize the way these patients are treated. You have to remove excess fluid, but we don't want to take a passive wait and see approach to see if the patient's long-term outcome is a viable one. We want to change it into a digital, proactive, therapeutic approach where we're going in and trying to take out as much blood as quickly as possible. And we do that with a system that combines cyclical treatment of needed fluid removal with patient monitoring, assessing the patient's condition, and automated irrigation. And that irrigation makes sure that the drainage catheter doesn't become blocked. And it also serves as a way to dilute the collected toxic material and even deliver targeted therapeutic drugs across the blood brain barrier like thrombolytic or antibiotics,

things that struggle to reach a therapeutic level in the brain. Got it. I think that's a helpful explanation. And for those listening that want to learn a little bit more about the technology, definitely encourage you to go to the website. It's iris.com. I rar-a-s-R-A-S-I-R-A-S-Ear-A-S-Ear-S.com. And there's some really kind of cool renders and various videos on the site. So just before we kind of learn a little bit more about where you're at in terms of, you know, development, commercialization, et cetera, if I'm a patient, right, that's potentially going to have access to the ERIS technology, I presume this is kind of a for death matter? So is it used in the, is it used in an ICU then? Is that kind of where it's? Yeah. Yeah. It's generally an emergent treatment, either for an intraventricular hemorrhage or even a chronic subdural hematoma depending upon the location of the bleed. And it's something where it really is, in many cases, a life or death experience. Sometimes it's placed in the operating room. Oftentimes, it's placed bedside in the intensive care unit, just depending upon the severity of the bleed and the condition of the patient. But these patients generally are the ones that are treated in the

neurosurgical intensive care unit. Okay. Got it. Yeah. It's always amazing to me that they're, you know, when I talk to, you know, whether it's founders or CEOs of, of companies like ERIS. And so many times the scenario plays out like, you know, hey, we're approaching this area that hasn't seen much innovation in like 100 years, 200 years. In your case, 250 years. And it's like, wow, that's a long time. You know, why isn't anyone else like approach this? You know what I mean? or tried to make a real go at solving for these issues, you know? It makes such perfect sense. We sit down and we talk to a neurosurgeon and they've been surrounded by innovation.

I had a spinal fusion 20 plus years ago. And the way that they do a spinal fusion now is drastically different than how they did it when I had my surgery. It can be done minimally invasive. I referenced chasing clot into the brain. Augmented reality, robotics, surgical navigation. Everything has changed in the world of a neurosurgeon. except for how they treat some of their sickest patients. And what we're doing is a very simple, elegant way of treating them.

It's all the various things that they will do manually during a patient treatment. They need to drain the fluid. They're going to monitor the patient's intracranial pressure. When needed, they will manually flush the catheter to make sure that patency is maintained or even to deliver a needed therapeutic drug. our system just does it in a digital, automated, intelligent fashion to ensure that all these things happen in a continuous basis. Yeah.

Yeah, it kind of reminds me of Heather Underwood. I think that I'm getting her, yeah, with Evo Indo. And she mentioned something similar. They're working in the, in the GI space where it's like all of these kind of components or aspects of our system were being done previously, but they were being done in silos, right? Or they were used kind of independently of each other and sort of just combined them into one. And so I'm a huge, huge fan of that kind of that approach. I often like to call it the Austin Cleon approach where you're stealing,

you're stealing from other things and just combining it into a certain package and a package and putting a ribbon on it, you know, so. It's the work smarter, not harder mentality. Our system is doing everything that the resident physician and the nurse is doing manually, but it's doing in a continuous automated fashion so that the patient is being watched and treated all the time instead of when. and they walk into the room once an hour. Right, right.

Well, cool. Yeah. So, Will, before we step in the old MedSider time machine, that was super helpful to get an idea of ERIS at a high level. We'll certainly dig into kind of lessons learned, you know, over the last five years you've been with the company. But give us just a general sense of where you're at. It's a publicly traded company.

You're actively commercializing. Is that? We are. Okay. We've got a unique pedigree. The system was invented by a Greek neurosurgeon when he was studying at the Carolinska Institute in Stockholm. And so as he was going from a concept drawn on a napkin, if you will, and wanted to start building prototypes, the initial angel funding for the company,

the seed round, was generated through successful Swedish business persons. And as the concept was validated and the idea was there to take this and turn it into a real company, instead of engaging American venture capital groups like many early stage companies, including those from my past, had been, the decision was made in Stockholm to take the company public on one of the secondary NASDAQ exchanges. And we've started becoming at a very early stage a publicly traded company. We went public at the end of 2017. And if state is a Swedish publicly traded company ever since, since that point, much of the company's operations had been transitioned here. here. We're based, I'm talking to you from San Diego, California, 90 plus percent of what we do as a company is now originated from Southern California. We are commercially available. A system has regulatory clearance in the United States, has CE mark, and regulatory approval in a number of markets around the world. Probably one of the most exciting things that's happened to us over the past six months or so. We actually just finalized a commercial partnership with Medtronic here in the

United States. So our system is being sold through a number of the Medtronic neurosurgical territory managers. And that's a very exciting proposition for the future of ERIS. Got it. Cool. Maybe the most coolest aspect about all of this is like you could say you're part Swedish, right? Well, it makes it very difficult in all reality to to lead a bi-continental company during a global pandemic. I don't encourage that for any of your listeners. But at the same time, it's it's given us a unique perspective on how to to grow and build things and make sure we have an appropriate answer for for customer needs on multiple continents yeah yeah it's a classic scenario of like you shouldn't wouldn't wish that on anyone but let the lessons learned probably from that

experience you know may be worthwhile in the in the end so um with that said we'll board members like to come to San Diego in the wintertime and we like to handle our business in Stockholm during the summer yeah yeah no doubt no doubt yeah not a not bad proposition. Okay, cool. Let's let's go back in time a little bit. And we mentioned a couple of these startup companies that you've been involved with, right? Access closure, Hotspur, athromed, all had nice, nice exits, or at least, at least what it looked like, you know, from afar. This question is somewhat broad, but I'd like to kind of maybe hone in on on things that like immediately surface when you think of early stage companies, right, and how they get

lift off. Where do you think most entrepreneurs or, you know, leaders in these early stage companies make the biggest mistakes. Having gone through a lot of various processes and having seen the good, the bad, and the ugly and navigated many mistakes, most of them my own doing, there's a lot of different ways you can take the answer to this. But you have to absolutely make sure that what you're building meets and exceeds the needs of your customers in every possible way. I think I saw one of your recent interviews and it really resonated with me. You got to make sure that the clinical, the economic, the user experience, all those pieces are in place because you see it time and time again. No product's going to launch the way you think

it's going to launch. No products going to launch how it's outlined in your launch plan. No revenue model that you build pre-commercialization is actually going to come to fruition because you're going to hit bumps in the road along the way. As many of those bumps in the road that you can identify in advance and try to strategize your way around, it's going to make your life a million times easier. And the fact that you've thought through these things and the fact that you have tried to adjust accordingly will make all the difference in the world. So that's a critical piece. Don't rush yourself and think that you have everything figured out. Always ask the extra question. Always engage that extra physician, particularly those that may be naysayers, to make sure that you have all of

your bases covered. That's a critical piece. You see things that are brought through the various stages of the design control process way too quickly at certain times. And of course, there's a needed return. There's only so much cash you have in the bank. But overinvest up front in exceeding your users needs is a critical piece. And it could give horror stories every step of the way of each company where certain things have been overlooked and you have to circle back around and address that accordingly. And then the other one in particular is it's changed as the role in the organization has evolved. When I started as an individual contributor or even moving into senior leadership, everyone around the table is there for a reason and everyone has value to add. So you have to make

sure that you give everybody the voice to contribute and make sure that it's a situation where everyone is learning from everyone. I don't have the answers as a CEO. I want to surround myself with people who are passionate and bring different perspectives than mine. And if you're an individual contributor, jumping into a small team, having the confidence in the voice to make sure that that opinion and that voice is heard is a critical part in one's own development and evolution. And then not losing sight of that, the further you go up the ladder within the organization. At the end of the day, everyone's voice needs to be heard. Everyone's voice needs to challenge each other.

And everyone needs to be confident enough that they can speak in that manner in order to address and identify all of those hurdles early on. Yeah, and I'm totally tracking with you for sure. And I think maybe I shared this on a recent podcast that I was actually on where like as a as if you're in kind of a leadership role, you've got to be, you know, so sort of like a balance between, you know, being being humble, but yet confident enough to just ask questions, ask questions to the right people and let let them kind of like demonstrate right. Their their expertise. And you know, I don't, I'm sure you probably seen it. I actually made a lot of this mistake earlier on in my career when

I was chip on my shoulder trying to prove that I knew all this, all this stuff. And it's like you, I think stealing Ryan Holiday's recent book, you know, or a fairly recent book, ego is the enemy. I mean, it really can be the enemy, you know, in so many circumstances and being confident enough to ask simple, straightforward questions and let the domain experts kind of like demonstrate, you know, their value and what they bring to the table is crucial, you know, in terms of driving that culture. Well, you see it at various inflection points in one's career.

the first time a sales professional goes into sales management, it's oftentimes a very challenging transition for someone because they're used to being the best. They're used to doing it. And you see, and I've got examples across all of those companies that you referenced, of someone who's stepping into sales leadership for the first time, and they want to become the district manager on steroids, if you will, and run around and put out the fires for everybody on their team instead of managing and leading and helping everybody else realize how to do it themselves. And the same thing happens every time you take a step up in the organization. I walk into every meeting thinking I know the answer.

But the worst thing that I can do to my team is to let my opinion be known early in the conversation because that's immediately going to steer the direction of the dialogue. The hardest thing for me is actually keeping my mouth shut. but asking the questions, extracting everybody's input before letting my own opinion be known, you've got to shut up and listen and speak and speak last in these types of situations or else you're going to negatively influence the contribution of everybody sitting around the table. Yeah, that's really good stuff. Just to add a few like a add on to your previous point about user needs.

I mean, I couldn't agree more. these MedTech projects, right? Whether it's something that you're building from ground up or, you know, you're joining and leading a group of people as a CEO or what have you. Typically, they're pretty long windows, right? I mean, you're talking about at the very least, maybe three to five years, but, you know, in a lot of cases, seven to ten years. And if you haven't thought through user needs, not just from like an engineering perspective, right, but user needs across the board, how is someone going to pay for this device? You know, how is, how is that the physician going to use it, but also how is the, how is a nurse or tech going to use the product

to, et cetera, et cetera. We could go on and on. But really understanding user needs, like, you know, from a 360 view, so crucial because you could be so far down the path and, you know, have missed on some major issues by not thinking holistically about user needs across the board. Well, and I would say, and I can give a couple of examples of what we've navigated here with our airflow system. our system was invented by a neurosurgeon based on how a neurosurgeon would approach the treatment of one of these patients.

But now, when you say user needs, it goes well beyond that engineering piece that you reference. It goes well beyond what the surgeon's needs are. If you haven't fully captured the economic value proposition and sell that all the way up to ladder at a hospital system, if you don't have something that is perceived to be excessively user-friendly for the nurses, you'll meet resistance along the way. And we've had to, during the pandemic, where we couldn't be there to handhold the team within an intensive care unit, we had to upgrade and overhaul our software and our remote training capabilities to exceed those user needs. Because if the nurse is not comfortable with an evolution of treatment, then it's,

it's not ever going to be adopted. We can talk about the limitations of passive drainage that's been out there for 40 plus years, but you know what? That's what's comfortable to the staff and an intensive care unit. And when you take a tool and take it from something that would be equivalent to a flip phone or a rotary flown and upgrade it to a smartphone, there's some initial trepidation with nurses. And if the system does not walk them through every step of the way to give them that comfort to give them that confidence, then there's going to be initial hesitation and initial pushback. And that's something that we learned firsthand have had to develop our way through.

And much of our training, much of our investment up front now is not on selling the neurosurgeon on the concept, because that just intuitively makes sense. It's selling the nurse and the resident physicians on the intelligence of the system of the process of how the system is going to ultimately make their lives easier if they're receptive to it. Yeah. So, so important. you could get dock buy-in across the board, right? All of the physicians want it, but yet,

you know, something could just be kind of die or maybe you don't nearly see the adoption that you expected if, if you're, you know, your support staff, nurses, techs, et cetera, aren't on board and you're not making that an easy process for them. So yeah, really, really great point. Well, let's transition a little bit to your career. Maybe this makes sense to address my earlier question about when you first made the leap kind of from, you know, Boston Scientific, great proving ground to your first startup. But I know a lot of commercial, folks probably that were in a similar boat that I was, whatever, 10-ish years ago, when I looked at your career and I was like, man, I want to do what Will's doing. Like, he's doing all these cool

things and is with, you know, leading sales organizations and all these cool startups. But, you know, so many are stuck, right? They don't know how to make that transition or they don't know they're too uncomfortable with the leap, et cetera. So maybe when you look back on on your career and the evolution there, you know, are there a few things that come to mind, you know, and maybe think, think back, you know, when you were, you know, making the decision to leave Boston. Hey there, it's Scott. And thanks for listening in So Far. The rest of this conversation is only available via our private podcast for MedSider Premium Members. If you're not a premium member yet, you should definitely consider signing up. You'll get full access to the entire library of interviews dating back to 2010. This includes conversations with experts like Renee Ryan, CEO of Cala Health, Nadid Miarid, CEO of CVRX, and so many others.

As a premium member, you'll get to join live interviews with these incredible medical device and health technology entrepreneurs. In addition, you'll get a copy of every volume of Medsider mentors at no additional cost. To learn more, head over to MedsiderRadio.com forward slash premium. Again, that's Medsiderradio.com forward slash premium.