Medsider: Learn from Medtech and Healthtech Founders and CEOs - Why Some of the Best Medtech Opportunities Hide in Plain Sight: Interview with BRIJ Medical CEO Tim Gleeson

Episode Date: October 28, 2025

In this episode of Medsider Radio, we sat down with Tim Gleeson, CEO of BRIJ Medical, a company rethinking one of the oldest procedures in medicine — surgical wound closure.BRIJ’s Brijjit Force Modulating Tissue Bridge is a small, non-invasive clip designed to redistribute tension across incisions, helping wounds heal with fewer complications and smaller scars.An accomplished entrepreneur and investor, Tim also founded and led Novasyte Health through its acquisition by IQVIA and later launched VIDANT Capital. A former Medtronic executive, Tim brings global experience and a lifelong passion for building impactful medtech ventures.In this interview, Tim shares why the biggest opportunities often hide in “boring” markets, how focusing on physician champions and patient psychology drives commercial traction, and why the best fundraisers plan for twice the time and four times the cost.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 Tim Gleeson.

Define the market, find a big problem to solve, find an entrenched big player who's kind of taken their eye off the ball, and start nibbling at it. Be a pest. I like those businesses where you are off the radar, just chipping away, chopping wood, until finally someone turns around and goes, oh, who are they? Where'd they come from? And so that's what I would be looking at when I sort of assess a business opportunity. 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. And this episode of Medsider, I sat down with Tim Gleason, CEO of Bridge Medical, a company developing the Bridget Force Modulating Tissue Bridge, a non-invasive device. designed to reduce tension and improve healing in surgical incisions. An accomplished entrepreneur and investor, Tim founded and led Novocyte health through its eventual acquisition by Acuvia and later launched a venture capital firm investing in healthcare innovators like Genmark DX, Mesa Biotech and Truvian.

A former Medtronic executive, Tim brings global experience and a lifelong passion for building impactful MedTech ventures. Here, a few of the key things that we discussed in this conversation. First, look where everyone else stopped looking. And MedTech Breakthrough doesn't always mean brand new. Some of the best opportunities sit in markets so familiar, they've become invisible. Categories dominated by incumbents who assume there's nothing left to improve. For Tim, the play isn't to out-innovate the world.

It's to quietly out-execute in spaces where competitors have grown comfortable. Second, commercial traction starts long before revenue. In MedTech, adoption isn't just about having the right product. It's about understanding the networks of influence that drive clinical behavior. Tim built Bridges Foundation by focusing first on physician champions, preparing for longer than expected sales cycles and embracing modern marketing tactics that meet clinicians where they are. Third, use the two to four rule for better fundraising. Contents playbook for capital discipline is rooted in realism. Every milestone takes twice as long and costs four times as much

as founders expect. His rule of thumb, raise when dinner is served, reminds leaders to secure funding while investor interest is high, not when cash is low. All right, before we dive into this episode, I'm pumped to share that volume seven 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 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 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, Tim, welcome back for a second round on Medzada Radio. Appreciate you coming on, man.

Yeah, I appreciate it. Thank you for having me on. Again, I think it's always, this will be a second round for us, but it's always awesome to watch the growth of your podcast and where you're going. So excited to be here. Yeah, likewise. And I'm excited to talk about your new company, right? Because the last time we caught up, and I highly encourage everyone to go back and listen to, Tim's always a great guest and pretty, pretty compelling.

So definitely encourage you to go back and listen to that one because it's been, gosh, what, probably eight years, at least maybe, something like that. But we chatted about NovaSite, which was the company that you were running at the time, had a nice little exit to IQV. I say little. It wasn't little. I think it was probably pretty nice for you and the rest of your team, I can imagine. But I think actually, if I remember correct, I'd have to go back and look specifically,

but NovaSite was acquired by IQIA, like maybe a year or two later after we recorded that podcast. Yeah. And you've since kind of opened up a venture firm and now, you know, the now operationally running, running bridge and brought, it sounds up brought a lot of the Nova site folks back on and did the classic kind of, you know, rejoining of the band or building up at the end again. So, so with that said, for those that are listening to this aren't familiar with you, I recorded a very short bio at the outset of this episode. But let's just start there. Like, what's the like the two minute overview of your background kind of leading up to running or running bridge now? Okay, so I've done this a couple of times, so I'm going to go way back.

I'm originally from Australia. In 93, my dad sold a company to Bayer. We got moved to America. And shortly thereafter, Mom won a green car in the lottery, and we got to stay. So I went to Boulder undergrad and then landed in New York City with a little company called ADP, which is a payroll software company selling payroll door to door, did well with that, and then got recruited into medical device with the company at the time was called Kendall, later becomes COVIDian, later becomes metronic. And so I was a sales rep for them in New York City,

migrated out to the West Coast to be a region manager, Landlin Orange County. Didn't want to do that forever. And so in 2008, wrote a business plan and sent it to my then counterpart in the Northwest, Joe, Andrew, who goes on to become my business partner. And the whole concept was providing nurses to do education training and support for medical device companies. Because every day we woke up as medical device sales reps and managers, we would spend 62% of our day doing education and training and in-servicing. So, long story short, we grew that business after failing a couple of times. We sold that to IQVIA in 2019. It was a transformational exit for us. Yeah, awesome. And IQVia was a fantastic acquirer. They had a really good strategy about what they want to do in med tech,

which is what they've done in pharma in the early 90s. And they've gone on to do a phenomenal job. and still in touch with those guys. Post that, I ended up doing two years sort of M&A strategy portfolio rationalization at Icuvia. And that was taking their farmer portfolio and says what applies to MedTech. And so we did this sort of workshop and ended up bringing that in. And now they've got a really broad range of offering that is complementary to medical device. At the same time, I started a venture fund, thought like every entrepreneur who has an exit, being a venture capitalist is the exact next step you should do. Quickly learned that after making 10, 15 investments,

I wasn't sure if I was any good at it. And quite honestly, I didn't really enjoy it. And there are a lot of people out there who love putting money to work. I am much more of an operator. And so in 24, an opportunity was brought to me by a private equity firm to take a look at it. I passed out a couple of times, as did they. And then eventually the founder, Dr. Monti Eves, came back into my sphere and we connected And then 15 months ago, I became CEO of Bridge Radical.

Got it. We're recording this in mid-20205, if you're listening to this after-of-fact, Q3 to be specifically. Yeah. So it kind of sounds like you've been at it for, what, almost a couple of years, a year and a half, a couple of years, something like that. On Bridge, I've, I started February 2024. So we did a recap on the business. A lot of fundraising round brought in a bunch of the old board members and investors and friends

and family, all high net worth and seed capital and haven't not done a valued round yet. Yeah, it's really interesting. interesting, super interesting category. We can get into it. Yeah, absolutely. So I'm looking at the website right now, which is Bridge Medical, B-R-I-J Medical, B-R-I-J Medical.com. If you don't get to the full write-up on MedSight or highly encourage you to check it out, it's really cool technology. But give us a sense for kind of, at least at a high level, right? If I'm a high school student, I know nothing about this. What are you doing? How is it unique? Give us a sense for kind of what this is. Thank you for staging it that way. So every year, there are roughly 92 million

surgeries that require a skin closure. So that means you get a laceration on your head, you get a knee surgery, you might get plastic surgery, you might get breast reconstruction. In that instance, there is a way in which to close the skin. And it's typically layered. The deep layers, which is the furthest and down, you close, and that's how you try and get this. So that by the time you get to the final layer of skin closure, the skin is basically touching together and then that final layer is securing it to make sure that it doesn't open, right? So 92 million procedures. Well, in those 92 million procedures, roughly 6.7 million will end in some sort of wound complication. So that's the stage. What's happening today is that the evolution

of skin closure hasn't changed much. They've been using sutures since caveman days, sutures being stitches. We've had some things come along like staples and then we've got some glue and then we've got like a negative pressure, like a pump that sits on top. But generally speaking, it's still a majority done with sutures. So the way in which wound healing happens is when you can offload tension on the incision, which means it's not pulling apart. You have all these benefits. And those benefits are like decreased open wounds, improvement in scar, improvement in blood flow,

and improvement in healing overall. And that means happier patients with fewer scars. So Dr. Monti Eves, former head of plastics, out of Emery, created this little clip, this little force modulating bridge that lands on the skin. It's non-invasive. It sits on top with proprietary acrylic adhesive and averts the skin. And I know no one's seeing this at home, but I'm going to show you that there. And as you see, there's like an inversion that sits right atop, which means the skin sort of rests

underneath that bridge with zero tension, up to zero tension, which then gets all these great outcomes. So I'm not sure if that's the high school version, but that's generally what we're doing. Yeah, I'm tracking. I'm tracking. I'm also on the website that I mentioned earlier, Bridge Medical, there's just above the fold on the homepage. There's like a really good, like, little animation, very realistic animation that really kind of emphasizes a lot of those key points that you just shared in terms of kind of how this little device works. So very cool. Give us a sense from kind of where the company is at as of Q3, 2025. Yeah, so we are commercial. We've got a 510K exempt product class.

on medical device. We've got two skews. So this is our larger product here, which is this product here, the force modulating tissue bridge. We've got a smaller one, which is for foot and ankle and smaller locations, which is the green box. So two skews, one product. And then we're in the final stages of actually delivering our package of the FDA, well, 510K clearance for another class one device, which will be a skin sealant that sits right on top of the skin. Got it. But you are actively commercializing right now in the United States. So yeah, sorry. So in, In 2023, the product was really launched, and that was in plastics. In 2024, we came along and we said, okay, we can accelerate this. And so 25, we're going to have a good year,

but really laying the foundation for 26. I mean, we've built a sales team. We've rebranded the business. There's a lot that's going on. There's a lot of spinning plates, but we feel like we're doing all the right thing to plant seeds, but it's sort of accelerate growth for 26. Yeah, I love it. I love these technologies that are seemingly straightforward, right, but solve a huge need, right? I had no idea if there's like, what'd you say, 92, 93 million skin closures, and it sounds like almost about 10% or so, like end in this sort of adverse event. So, yeah, huge, huge need to like do maybe something a little bit different, right? When it comes to this area. So with that said, again, bridgemedical.com, bridge, I don't know how to best pronounce

the J. Bridge or bridge. Bridge like a B-R-I-D-E. Bridge. Very good. Bridge medical, but it is B-R-I-J medical. exactly and we'll link to it again in the full write-up that up that'll accompany this particular podcast on med site or we'll also link to tim's full LinkedIn profile too so you can take a look at his his background and maybe reach out if it if it's uh if it's warranted so with that said let's spend the next like 20 30 minutes kind of going through some key key functional areas right I think it's going to be especially interesting considering you spent really your entire career in med tech you exited a business started a fund now back in the CEO you know helm kind of running

running running another device company so I think this should be a fun conversation let's start out with kind of almost going from kind of, you know, beginning to end, if you will. Right. And I think this is especially relevant because you, you not only invested in a lot of deals at, is it, Vodons? Yeah, Vodon, the venture firm. You see a lot come across your desk. I imagine you probably still do today, right? You see a lot of just come across your desk. A lot of folks that listen to this that either maybe are investors themselves or maybe, you know, are stuck on this idea that's in their head. They want to maybe give something a swing, right? Yeah. And so with that said, When you think about whether or not to pursue an idea, right, and to go all in,

maybe take a bridge, for example, like, what are a couple things that you typically look for, right, when you try to kind of pull the trigger on something? My investment thesis is always diligence heavily, and I try to bring as smarter people around me as possible to help coach me. But ultimately, I've got a lot of gut instinct here. And I know that's probably a terrible answer for some people who are very financially driven or sort of market, you'll never be able to underwrite this particular product at the valuation we came in with.

Like, it's just, you never get the numbers sort of incomparable valuations. Hey, is it worth the, so what I looked at was in large part, let's look at the problem to solve. How big is the problem, right? And then that is anywhere between five and a half to nine billion dollar market. And to me, that's great. Then I look at how much of the market do I need to capture in order to be successful? And it's a pretty small amount.

And we don't need to be a billion. exit in order for this to be a home run. And so that's the other thing is some of these. I was just at the MedTech Innovators Accelerator up in the Silicon Valley area, and it's a fantastic program. And there are people who are shooting for the stars, like curing cancer type moves. I love the novel niche products that play in big markets that are going after massive entrenched competitors, quite frankly fat competitors, who I've got very little eyeballs on this little

part of the business. And so if we can nibble at their lunch and get to a point where we're annoying enough, then the world is opened up, whether you become an acquisition target or it becomes that much more fun and you're going out and you're saying, hey, they're not focusing on it. We are where you guys. So big problem to solve, big market, heavily entrenched players. And again, I like to find niche products, like little niche products that'll fit in somewhere. So I'd say that's really what I've looked at. I love the kind of those criteria that you looked at. but the market obviously being, you know, an important factor, and I think that's huge, right? I mean, if you're going to go all in on a device play, you know, if the markets, if you're

stand out on a market size of, you know, $200 million, that's going to be tough. It's going to be tough. I mean, you need to, the market needs to be sizable enough. But I think too many of these opportunities don't get their, don't get full appreciation, right, from true operators like yourselves, right? Where it's like, you know, take your device specifically, you know, some people, oh, it's not novel enough. It's not sexy enough. But it's like this monster market as you said, all of the incumbents are fat. And they're focusing on robots and, you know, like, you know, AI widgets and stuff. And that's great.

I think they should and we should. But being able to find, I've said this, you know, one man's trash is another man's treasure. Like find a category that might be in decline, but hasn't been innovated or iterated against in a while. And now, I will say, we are trying to change habits, which is the toughest thing on earth to do with surgeons. but I still think it's a worthy cause and we're in the game and it's an honorable market and

the patient outcomes, the patient testimonials, they drive us every day. When you start getting those like feel good responses about scar outcomes on women in vertical incision on breast and they're like, it's changed the way I do practice. It's changed my patience out. That becomes, you know, next level. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, no doubt. And you know, there's this, there's this concept and I see it maybe more on X, right, of like operators taking, you know, investing or even buying, you know, quote unquote boring businesses, right? And it's kind of the same framework where it's like HVAC company, plumbing company, whatever that, like there's a huge, there's a huge market. And most of those service operators are really old school, right? And they're not innovative.

They're not doing anything different. They haven't like done anything new in decades, right? And it's kind of the same principle, right? You've got these huge incumbents, whether it's J&J or name your massive strategic that. probably is not going to allocate large R&D dollars towards, you know, doing something they've got a big enough share already. Exactly. And so if you can come in, take a piece, even a small piece of that market, it's being a really good business and probably would be acquired by one of those strategics, right?

Yeah. Down the road. So I like it. And I think maybe the take home message for anyone listening is, you know, your thing, it doesn't always have to be some, a robot, right? It doesn't have to be some sexy toy that's going to require $300 million in capital, you know, to take it off the ground. Not everybody is going to create self-driving cars.

Some people have to create, you know, the steering wheel cover, you know. And so a little bit sort of acts and picks to the gold mine idea, the gold rush idea. But yeah, no, absolutely. Yeah. The other thing you mentioned, though, too, is that I think is always interesting is like some of these ideas that appear to be, oh, kind of interesting, kind of cute, right? They end up having massive, like, implications to the patient, right? So take, like, a scar, right? You know, whether it's in the world of plastics or derm, if something.

someone ends up with like a really bad scar like that that's not going away right or you know it's staying with him and so if they if that scar is even you know 20 30 percent better right through a unique device like that's that's pretty game changing you know what i mean so that's kind of a cool element and i think is you know sometimes under underappreciated with these uh with these cool technologies that sometimes i'm just going to double click on that for a second the psychology behind scar is shocking right like the idea that one of my slides in one of my my my most recent updates to the investors was just a picture of a vertical incision scar and it's laced with a suture and it's kind of crinkled and pill-tight. And that is what surgical healing

looks like and has looked like for so many years. And especially as you see more sports injuries with female and younger generation, the concept I've had with a recent conversation was if you could improve the scar, even though it may not be the number one issue in orthopedics, why wouldn't you? And so we've got to change the mindset a little bit that you don't have to rest on a bad scar or an average scar. You can have great scar outcomes and have all the benefits of the internal workings of that surgical procedure. So yeah, scar is a big one for us. Yeah, that's cool. Probably pretty rewarding to see, as you mentioned, some of those, some of that patient feedback, right? In addition to the physician feedback, right? Because obviously they're rewarded too if their

patients are happy. So with that said, let's talk a little bit about kind of how you're thinking about commercializing, right? Because this is obviously an area that's right at your wheelhouse. You grew up in commercialization roles, then had a lot of success at Nova sites and now rebranded, you know, bridge and, you know, are off to the races. It's pretty, pretty cool branding, by the way, I'm looking at it. You're listening to this, but I'm looking at a pretty cool, pretty cool, like very SoCal kind of post bridge medical poster in the, in the, in their artwork in the background. That was, that was done by the book, like one of my four boys, by the way. Like a summer ago where we had, we were running out of things to do with the summer. And I'm like,

do just go paint me a bridge sign and he came up with that so it's cool i love that the the interesting swag that kind of ends up around the family house you know what i mean it's like i've got some fast wave stuff around always always gives you puts a smile on my face when my kids grab the fast wave mug versus something else but uh but yeah but talk about about about your kind of your commercial approach because i could imagine with a with a device like this you could go a number of different directions right plastics derm yeah general surgery how are you kind of approaching it and, you know, based on kind of your pretty deep experience, you know, launching devices. Yeah, look, 15 months in, I would tell you, I'm still trying to find the perfect strategy

for multiple audiences. And that's really what's going on. We got our start in plastic surgery and we got our start really in the vertical incision on a master pecta. So breast lift, breast reduction, breast reconstruction, super rewarding, horrible scars, constantly under tension, big impact. Okay, great. We've got that. And then we shifted and we said, okay, but we're going to build a sales force and I think we need to bring more orthopedics into play so hips knees shoulders foot and ankle especially in foot and ankle where there's very little soft tissue and big wounds okay let's look at that and then we've got now a focus on the hips and the knees so in doing that you you open the aperture to these different procedures and you realize how different the call point

is and how different the sales cycle is and so i've told the team and it's one sales force selling into multiple call points, which can be challenging, right? But I've told the team there is our house plants who are private practice plastic surgeons. They are bread and butter. Nobody, I'll take this, I say this out loud, I won't say it at this point, but plastic surgeons are regarded as the best in wound closure and fixing bad scars and bad wounds. Orthopedists listen to plastic surgeons more so in wound closure, more so than plastic surgeons listen to orthopedists. So our gateway in is plastic surgery, so private practice, and then when they jump into that acute care setting to support a case,

to do a reconstruction case, we're finding our way through into that value analysis committee through that plastics channel. It's working, but what I'll tell you, my assumptions from my metronic COVIDian days were roughly a six to seven month sales cycle through VAC what we're learning and that it could be geopolitical it could be because we're tiny and no one's heard of us it could be just that the whole market exchange it's really closer to 13 maybe 15 months to go into the VAC get through the VAC get an evaluation get a positive

evaluation get product on shelves it's about 13 to 15 months and we're about seven months into that process with majority of our sales team so I don't think I have it all figured out I think We've got a great team around us. Joe, Andrew, my business partner from Noversight is running commercial here. He's doing a great job figuring out, okay, is this working, is it not? And then tweaking the dials. Ryan Jones, we brought over from Novosite. He was at Integra after us.

He's running national accounts. So we've got a really interesting strategy. But again, I would argue it's sort of written in pencil and we're erasing and rewriting at times because it's not all working, but some of it is. Got it. And that's super interesting, that timeline, right? I think it's just a healthy reminder that if you're thinking you'll get your 15K clearance in hand and be off to the races, you know, selling into hospitals next month, you know, no, that's, that's a

that's not going to happen. You need to build in a healthy, healthy amount to kind of get through the the VACs. I will say one of those variables in there, which I didn't maybe quite appreciate, was how well some of these very large entrenched competitors have contracted. So you go in and they go, hey, love the product. If we're going to move over to this, it's going to affect our agreement over here. How do we balance that? We've got a 10 to 20% carve out. Maybe you can have a shot at that, but we can't go a whole house. So we're learning. We're balancing. We're figuring it out. But like I said, we've raised enough capital to see us through. We've got an opportunity to really execute and pivot as we need to. But it's an exciting time. It's as boring as a category as

it might seem to a lot of folks who are selling robots and self-driving cars, it's super interesting what's happening, in my opinion, what's happening in this category right now. Yeah, and I've got to think that that strategy around really piggybacking off of the plastic surgeon in their private practice, right? Obviously, if you're selling into a private practice, there's a lot more of them and maybe not the volume, right, that's in a healthcare system, but certainly less time to sell into a private practice, right? So it probably helps.

Without a doubt. Without a doubt. It's much easier to sell into. It's lower volume. but they become raving fans a lot quicker. And so how do you harness that raving fan as an ambassador to help guide us into these other channels? Got it, got it.

And you're a pretty creative guy. So, like, how are you, are you doing anything from, I guess, a branding, a marketing perspective to kind of, you know, raise the level of awareness around Bridge and kind of what you're doing and what you're all about? Yeah. So we've got Charlotte Morella, who is our head of marketing at NovaSite and head of MedTech Marketing, Ocuvia is with us. And Sydney is working with Charlotte.

They're fantastic. I had a call. We have a board meeting this week. We've spent less than $4,000 in paid search or direct search, which is probably a problem, but we're doing a phenomenal job in building a brand and building an audience a lot through Instagram, plastics, folks, both patients and surgeons live in Instagram. They're very Instagram savvy. The orthopedic surgeons are less Instagram and more sort of LinkedIn and maybe a little Facebook.

So finding those channels is totally new, right, compared to the Medtronic and Nervasite days. But we are getting creative on how we're doing that. And we're just now in the process we've identified some fantastic KOLs. I think we're late to the game on this, quite frankly, but KOLs who are helping us not only drive additional clinical data, but helping us sort of evangelize at the podium. So we're doing some of the traditional things like that. And then we're doing some of the new sort of social media related things to get out there. One of the other pieces here is, and we haven't implemented this, but this concept of agentic AI supporting inbound, outbound and how that works, more to come on that. That's kind of like

toe in the water as we sit today. We're certainly on a leading edge, right? I think you're the first MetTech CEO that I've had on that's mentioned, agendic AI, right? So I love it. I love it. But even just thinking about that play, I think most device companies would be like, Instagram, are you serious, right? Like there's no way we're on Instagram. But the reality is Like, you just mentioned that most plastic surgeons, especially the ones that are doing high volume, they are absolutely on Instagram because that is their core, one of their core channels to reach their audience, right, about the services they offer. And so if you can somehow, you know, again, kind of leverage that, that's huge. That's a, yeah, I'm sure there's probably some

pretty, pretty strong multiplier. And that was one of the said. Yeah. I'll tell you a funny story. Hey, everyone. Let's take a quick break to talk about fast wave medical, the company at CoFAP 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 Fast Wave to over $40 million. Corporate interest in the IVL space

is growing two, 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 IVL 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 trial 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. One of my board members who is an absolute legend. I won't mention which one it is because he knows it when he hears this, but he called me up and he said, seem like what are you doing with this social media strategy like it's a little bit below you to be constantly doing i was doing tic-tock dances with plastic surgeons and walking the trade show floor backwards and and the general feedback was hey you got to build the audience now so that when when things really do pop you're not trying to build an audience you've got the audience built in and that audience sometimes those messages hit sometimes they don't so anyway he sent me some

pictures of himself on holiday and i said i'm going to post this on on instance Instagram and he goes, don't do it. And I did it and I loved it. And I shared it with him. I said, now you know what it feels like. Anyway, that's so good. But so spot on. I mean, I, I, hopefully five to 10 years from now, like this won't be a topic of contention, right? Because the reality is like, even though LinkedIn may be the core channel for tech, like you need to have a social presence, right? Regardless. And it doesn't, it doesn't require like huge resources. No. What it's, what it requires is constant tinkering, which, you know, I get a call from the marketing folks. I'm at a trade show. They're like, can you, you know, do this on-trend video? And I'm like, oh, God, am I doing this right now?

But again, some of these things go viral. We just had, as I said, a board meeting. And one of the things we did, one of the videos we did that Joe and I did, like making fun of each other about where we sit on a plane, got like a couple million views. And the board members are like, what? Why? And nobody knows but it all it does is enhance the brand at that point is I think so anyway oh yeah no doubt no doubt and and it's it's good to see like CEOs like yourself doing this right it's not like you this is your first rodeo had had nice exit invest yourself you're doing it was it Zimmer's CEO yeah Ivan yeah he's like very he's like very prolific on LinkedIn you know what I mean yeah yeah yeah and you know hopefully there's a little bit of a little bit of a sea change here

and he kind of breaks all the rules he's got the personal stuff he's got the business stuff and people love it. They're engaged. So not everyone can pull that off, but he does a really good job for sure. He does. I think more people could probably like get there if they, they just give it a shot. But yeah, let's move on to capital raising, right? Another area that's in your wheelhouse, you had a kind of unique, unique perspective, right, sitting on both sides of the table as an investor as a former operator that exited now, current operator running a startup. And so give us maybe like one or two key things that you know about fundraising now that maybe you wish you knew, you know, you know, 10 years ago, you know, when you're raising, raising capital for, for Novosite.

Yeah. So let me, let me just be clear on Nova site. We never raised any capital. We were not investable. Like, we were a services business that wasn't really a scrapping along. We ended up selling 35% of the company to my dad for $35,000. And he said, you're not worth much, but I'll come and invest my time. So raising capital was like new. I actually was deploying capital way more than I was raising capital. So let me just give you that perspective. And what I'd say on the don't raise capital, it's a slow slog. Your balance sheet funding year one to year two to year three. And I loved that because culturally, you only hire as much as you can afford. The downside of having cash on hand is that you can get a little spendy and go, hey, we want three of those and two of those.

And so it's not in my nature. Even after the big exit and all that, I still look at Joe and I go, which end of the subway sandwich do you want? Like, that's, that's how we keep it. And, and there was a bonus contention years ago, and Joe's on the exact same page with me. And now we're trying to sort of push that down through the organization. But on the fundraising side, what I would say is, and I'm guilty of this, always overly optimistic when somebody said this, when dinner is served to eat, so raise money as much as you can on the story before you go to market without having it be totally dilutive. And another board member told me, he goes, the 24 rule, it's going to take you twice as long and four times as much to do what you think

you're going to do. And he says, you're pretty much on track. So I would say in the laws of, if you're raising capital, think in those terms. And again, I'm so entrepreneurial, optimistic. I was just guilty of it too. And then on the spending side, you know, all I can say is once you've got that capital in the bank. It's an immense amount of responsibility having other people's money, OPM in the bank account. And any fixed costs that I can navigate appropriately and make sure that it doesn't become, if I can avoid a fixed cost, I will. So anyway, I think from my standpoint, it's a much faster path. We've got a lot, a lot, like in the Nova site days, we did everything. Like, okay, I need to run payroll. You go build the marketing like that kind of thing, which is really

good in some respects, but very slow. And so now we've paid, not overpaid, but certainly paid for a big executive team. We've got the sales team. We've got all the pieces of the puzzle in place. Now it's about how do you get leverage on your cost structure? We can grow this thing to six, seven, maybe $10 million without adding another head. But that becomes somewhat of an anchor as it sits today. So optimism, raise as much as you can when you can, 24 rule, two times as long, four times as much and then spend appropriately. That's the responsibility I'd say when you grow up, it was money in. Yeah, those are really, really good financial aspects. I did not realize that you bootstrapped NovaSight. So, wow, wow, that's even more impressive considering

the exit there. Yeah, that's good. Hopefully your dad, you know, maybe, you know, passed a little bit of that ROI. I wish. So I can tell you, unfortunately he passed away before you saw this outcome. Yeah, but he was the best. He was like fantastic guy. Failed out of college, had an exit to Bayer, went to Bayer, hated corporate America, had an exit to Roche, started another one, had another exit to Roche. Like he was just like a gold toucher, but big grinder. But that 35% of all the things he did, I still think that 35% might have been the best

return on all these investments. And that even though I know he was looking down and mom was like, that's always, that's always heartwarming to know that there was a really, good exit in there. And I'll tell you, we wanted to share in that wealth with everybody, which again is why the entire executive team came back and is working for pennies on the dollar because one, we had a lot of fun and two, there was a big outcome. And three, I think that the work we're doing is important. Yeah. Yeah, that's awesome. And you can certainly back around to kind of your thoughts on fundraising in general. Those are, I just a couple of things to just to emphasize

is right, like kind of the hearing you kind of riff on sort of the urgency of, or my mindfulness, right, around even though you're coming off and oversubscribed around or you've got cash in the bank, I'm sure you've come across, right? CEOs that almost like there's a pressure release valve. And to a certain extent there is, right? If you, you know, you knew infusion of capital. But if you're not, if you don't act with urgency and mindfulness around that capital, you know, it goes, it goes fast. It'll go fast. And, and it's never, it's never a good position, you know, so I think just the constant sort of urgency around executing against those next milestones, even even coming off a, you know, oversubscribe around. Like,

you just didn't. I think it's really, really important. I guess the other thing, too, that, you know, just certainly resonate with me and maybe it's just, you know, because we're, we're out with Fastway, but just, you know, if you're, if you're budgeting a 20, 25, $30 million round, or maybe it's lower than that, something like that. And you're trying to kind of squeak by to avoid, avoid dilution. Yeah. I maybe rethink that, right? 100%. Always, always better to kind of, you know, give yourself another three to six months of burn, even though that may result in a few extra bips on a dilution, you just don't want to run out of capital.

I understand agree. And again, I'm learning a little bit on that my front too because some of the deals I've invested in and I've diligent, I've been great. Some of them have death by a million cuts of an extension or a safe and a safe and they never do a valued round. So the urgency and then again, I just say it like when dinner is served, eat one of my board members said that. And I go, that resonates.

because having less dilution of a company that runs out of cash and then goes into defensive fundraising mode is really tricky. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. I love that phrase. That's another one I might steal, right? When dinner is served, eat up, right? Eat up. Maybe you might have to fast for a little bit down the road. Exactly. Well, it's good. All right. Let's say, I know we don't have a ton of time left, but I want to circle back around to the time you spent at Icubia coming out of the exit

with uh from nova site and yeah i think this is especially interesting because a lot of you know startups if you're fortunate to exit you know it's like wash your hands and and move on and i never like that idea because one it's a small world right and two if you can if you could truly make it a win right for that acquirer that's typically going to you know yield a lot of good results even though they're not you know maybe direct results in the in the near term so just talk to us a little bit about how you went about that process maybe even yeah before the exit or even after the exit, right, in order to ensure really a smooth and effective outcome. Yeah, so a couple of things.

One, we were 10 years into Novosite going into our 11th year. I think we were roughly $40 million in revenue. And I think the exit price, and I'll just say it out loud, with something like $60 million. So this was going from four kids in one room in two bunk beds to, oh, maybe we can build a house. So that was the shift from 10 years to the tail end of year 11. Private equity had shown up very early on in this conversation. We were JP Morgan, and we were approached by a couple of different private equity firms.

And they would tap me on the shoulder and they'd say, well, we'd have a meeting. They'd say, what if I opened up the checkbook, right? $400 million check. What would you do with that? We'll buy you. You roll something forward. We'll open on the checkbook. And these are big, big private equity.

And I looked at him and I said, I'm not your guy to do that. I am exhausted. I'm cooked. I've got four little kids. I haven't for probably enough time with, and I almost immediately ruled out private equity as a strategic next step. Because my thought, which might have been wrong after the fact, is that I was going to go get on a different treadmill, right into a different treadmill. So it was all about strategics. And we were approached by a colleague who ran R&D business at IQVIA. And so at that point, we kind of said, okay, we've got private equity that's, that's sort of sniffing around. We've got one strategic that wants us to have meetings.

And at that point, I said, I'm going to make sure we go out and at least have three or four other strategics at the table so that when we do get to the point where something happens, we're not going, man, we didn't polish the penny long enough. So I'm giving you a little bit more than you probably want here. So I got three additional strategics into the mix. I then brought it to the board. I said we've got four strategics who are all interested. And that point they said, go get a banker.

Let's get five more. And so at that point, we had four on the line. We got a banker and I said, look, I've got these four involved. And this is Fairmont Partners. Shout out to my boy, God, I'll get his name. He still owes me to dinner in Vegas, by the way. And they went out and they got 16 interested parties down to like, I think, maybe eight LOIs, eight letters of interest.

So this was a very quick process. we never really did run a full process. Long story short, Icuvia had, of all the firms, Icubia had the most galvanized, thoughtful approach to what they wanted to do in MedTech. So I always thought about where all the employees were going to land. We had a much bigger offer from a company that was a farmer company, pharma services company, but they showed out with like a notepad. They had no thoughtful idea about what that were going to do.

And I thought, man, this could be a really bad place to land. If I'm not here, I don't know what all these, that I'd say a lot of people is, a lot of these people aren't going to be here. So, long story, longer. When Iquivia came through, the executive sponsor was great, the GM was great. And ultimately, my boss, Jamie, was fantastic. And she took an approach culturally, much like we were. And so in regards to how we structured the deal, it was 75% cash up front.

It was 15% retention, which meant roughly, which meant stay for two years, regardless, you're going to get paid. If you leave in two years, you don't get paid. And then 10% earn out. So we had some out-risk dollars. Year one, we crushed it and we overachieved. First year of the earn-out done. We're all high-fiving.

All right, we're in Miami. We're having a good time. Next, February, COVID hits. And we go, oh, God, what's this? And so February 13th, whatever the year was, we sent everybody home they never came back to that office that they never returned to that office in in total so now everybody's working from home we miss earn out year two and the president of the business called me and said hey why don't you stick around for another year and I said I'll stick

around for another year a day a week and if you give us another shot at the earn out and and so I worked Mondays I worked hard I cheerleaded I did some M&A sort of like CEO to CEO calls I'm made sure that our team was intact. And then Tuesday through Friday, I worked on Vident Capital for that year. All of that being said, I put retention and equity in almost every key employee's bag. So everybody we needed to stay, I took money out of my retention bucket. And I said, this person's important. And they're actually going to make my life easier if they're here. I want them to be successful. You want them. I will put some of my retention into their back. And so I started looking at it that way.

And that's not the big time myself. That's more to say, selfishly, I wanted the band to stay together. I didn't want our CFO to leave. I didn't want our head of HR to leave. And so that's basically how I did it. Very long way to get there. But yeah. You're a great storyteller.

I don't even want to, I kind of want to just leave that there, right? Because that's such a great kind of, you know, you captured kind of that journey, right, from initial conversations kind of through the integration. But I guess the only thing that maybe I'd added, I think is super important to highlight is is what you just mentioned, right? Is making sure the incentives align. And I think that speaks volumes for probably your character. And I'm probably sure one of the key things that you've got the band back together, right?

At Bridge. So kudos to you. That's awesome. I guess before we get to the rapid fire portion of the question, if you can quickly touch on culture, right? Because I think that segue is kind of based on what you just mentioned. Yeah. Like, are there a couple, I mean, culture can kind of sound cliche, right? And it's sometimes ambiguous.

But, you know, if you know it, if you've got it, right? There's typically a couple kind of key things, right, that are instilled in a company's culture. But, like, what's been, what do you think are like a couple of the most important things to really, really try to drive a positive, you know, optimistic, ambitious culture? There's pre-COVID and there's post-COVID culture, unfortunately. Pre-COVID culture was really team-focused, accountability, fumble jumpers is what we called them. It's not my job, but I'm on it. What do you need? And we could measure that visibly in anecdotal story.

and we always have worked with a concept called focus feedback where I can grab you for five minutes and hey, can I do a feedback session with you? And I can say here's what your actions look like. Here's the corporate value it are tied to. And here's the corporate objective that it came out to. Phenomenal. But here's an opportunity for improvement. And so we have this constant micro feedback loop as a culture. And I love that. And it could be the CFO to the CEO. It could be the brand new person who's in shipping, receiving to the CEO, it could be the, it's, there is no layers, right? So culturally, I would argue there are no layers in our business. There's nothing, I will set up the trade show booth, much like you can set up the trade show booth.

I will make coffee and bring it to the, to the customer meeting, much like you can. So there is zero jobs that are not, that one of us can't do or won't do. So a very flat organization at Bridge, it's a little bit unique because I'm working from home, which at times I love, like I can hear the kids in the pool. At times, I hate, I can't go grab a coffee with my colleagues anywhere near as much as I used to. So building culture in a remote setting is a challenge, in my opinion. But we are still driving this idea of fumble jumpers at Bridge. It's be a Swiss Army knife, be the person that you can rely on to do pretty,

much anything you need. You need to cover cases in the OAA. Speak to the CFO. He's in Florida. He's a rep track certified. He can help. And then when he comes home, he's going to make sure he gets me to cash flow statement. Like that kind of level is what we're talking about now within this organization. I would love to get under one roof at some point. We've got corporate headquarters out of Atlanta. We've got executive function. A lot of it's here in San Diego. It's the new normal. And so building that culture is still about, you know, focus feedback, be it's with army knife, stay above the line, meaning it's not my job. I didn't know what you asked for, like making excuses. That doesn't fly here.

So I think that's where we land on our culture still today. Yeah, three really good ways to kind of sum up what is seemingly a pretty healthy culture. You know a thing or two about it. So that's good stuff. I know we've only got a few minutes left here. So let's get to the rapid fire portion in the interview. But again, Bridge Medical, B-R-I-J Medical.com, highly encourage you to check out the technology, learn a little bit more about the company.

And who knows, maybe Bridge is, you know, we'll be hiring at some point in the future. You can join Tim's team. So with that said, rapid-fire questions, feel for you to answer in a kind of rapid-fire fashion or if you want to expand. It's totally fine. Let's fast forward to mid-20206. Take us out there. What is like the most exciting thing that, like, you're really looking forward to over the next year?

I'm excited to see the fruits of our labor. from basically first half 20, 25 all the way through, I think those seeds are going to start really sprouting come Q1 next year. That's my hope. Got it. All right. Since you made the call back in, I think, early 24 to take on the CEO Roller Bridge, you've seen a lot, right?

Invest in companies, exited a company. Is there anything that's like been surprising or unexpected over the last 18 months or so? Yeah. I forgot how hard it is to make money. like how hard it is to get traction it's i've said this to my team all week it is there are companies that just hit paid it and they click and they go and there are there are companies that the flywheel takes longer to spin and and i've told the team if it was easy everyone would do it and not everyone does it and so the privilege that we have to be grinding at this still remains exciting fun and

like a puzzle to solve. I have a feeling that you'll probably hit a point where it's like slow, slow, slow, and then everything kind of happens all at once. Exactly. Yeah, especially with a pretty cool technology that's, you know, that yields a lot of benefit to both the physician and the patient. Let's say we're in San Diego, just wrapped up a nice little intimate dinner with a bunch of other, you know,

med tech entrepreneurs. If you wanted to leave them with like one thing that they like 100% need to get right if they're going to, you know, have any sort of, you know, success at their startup, what would that be? That's a great question. I go back to the first question you asked, and that is to find the market, find a big problem to solve, find an entrenched big player who's kind of taken their eye off the ball and start nibbling at it. Be a pest. I like those businesses where you are off the radar, just chipping away, chopping wood until finally someone turns around and goes, oh, who are they? Where'd they come from? And so that's what I would be looking at when I sort of a business opportunity. Yeah. Whoa.

They're doing that much revenue? Like what? Where do they come from? I'd love that to be the case. I love those businesses. Well, I really, really do. In fact, I was chatting with Nitten and his name, his last name, I'm going to murder it. So I won't even try it.

But he's the sea of superior medical. But we were talking about, he's kind of doing a little bit of a, I would say, more sexier technology in the cardiovascular space. But he mentioned this very same thing, right? Like, your technology doesn't have to be some amazing leapfrog. You know, you're now, you know, you're now, you know, setting up shop with Elon and flying to Mars. It doesn't have to be that way. Pick a space, pick a big, a big market where there's a ton of interest.

And, you know, the incumbents either don't know how to do it, won't do it, are kind of, you know, I don't want to say sitting on the sidelines, but are kind of lazy on the sidelines, if you will. Yeah. Those are really good, really good areas to go after. So, all right, last question. Take us back to late 20s, early 30s, career starting to take off whether they're, maybe it was maybe it was comedian at the time or look into like, I don't I don't recall, but anything that you'd whisper in the ears of your younger self at that point in time.

I keep telling myself this now, and I'd probably tell my younger self this now, your impatience and your sense of urgency, and I can be a little sort of like my chairman tells me I'm ADD, but I don't think I am, it will serve you well. Like that combination paired with someone who's not like that, to be fair, can be really, really powerful. And I had to sort of, I felt like as a younger guy, I kind of bit my tongue a little bit. I was kind of like, maybe I'll just, I'll wait. And so now I think, you know, if I could do it again, I'd probably say embrace that earlier on. Yeah, that's good stuff. Good way to wrap up the conversation. This has been a lot of fun. Yeah. I'll have,

I'll have you hold on the line, Tim, but yeah, I can't thank you enough for for coming on the program. Thanks, mate. Thank you very much. For a second round. Again, everyone, bridgemedical, B-R-I-J medical.com. We'll link to it in the full write-up on Medsider. And again, if you're new to MedSider, these writeups are longer-form versions of the interview that highlight a lot of the key learnings that are going to share. Tim shared, was fortunate to share a ton of learnings on this particular interview, which was great. So I encourage you to check that out.

We'll link to Tim's LinkedIn profile as well in that full write-up. But thanks again for your listening attention, as always, until the next episode of Medsider goes live, everyone to take care. Hey, it's Scott again. One quick thing before you go. You see, I love bringing you insightful conversations with the best founders and CEOs of medical device and health technology startups. But here's the thing. I'd be super grateful if you could help me reach even more ambitious doers who share our passion.

So if you found value in this podcast, if you found yourself nodding your head while listening, or if you simply enjoy what we're doing with Medsider, please take a moment to leave us a review. It's super easy. Just open your Apple podcast app or the podcast app of your choice. Search for our show and scroll down to the ratings and review section. Leave your honest thoughts and hit that five-star rating if you think we're worthy. Your feedback is incredibly important and so the best way to ensure we keep bringing you awesome discussions with leading founders and CEOs. us. So take a moment to be a good friend and leave that review today. As always, thanks for being a part of our journey and for helping Medsider continue to grow and evolve. Your support is

greatly appreciated. All right, enough talk about reviews. Stay tuned for another informative episode coming at you soon.