BoneChat #123 - AI Tools for MedTech Startups, Repless Sales Models, and Fundraising Strategies

Good. When I put my— hey, Raymond— when I put my recruiter hat on, I mean, I get this all the time from candidates. I'm not moving unless you have a job in Denver, Austin, Nashville, Raleigh-Durham. Those are the— I get those four all the time.

Yeah, I can see, I can see that. Thankfully, there's some companies here, and it's kind of funny because I'm on on an advisory board for, uh, they're affiliated with CU, and so they're starting their BME program, and I'm industry advisory board. And, and, uh, so really helping the kids get jobs, you know, their first jobs. And they're, they're 4 hours away from the Front Range, but they'll all come to Denver or the Front Range for, for jobs. And so it's, uh, it's interesting because, you know, they at least have that. They don't have to, like what I did, I left UC Davis, I went to Memphis. I lasted 3 years in Memphis because the mountain biking isn't that great. The people are amazing, but there's no mountain biking. Fly fishing is limited. Snowing— skiing and snowboarding is limited. So yeah, it's tough.

Humidity though.

What's that? Humidity. You got humidity and catfish.

Yeah, and I did—

I did— I didn't enjoy I enjoyed catfish. I didn't enjoy humidity.

No.

All right. So let's get, let's kick this off. So this is open discussion. So any, I want to, I want to reserve some time to talk about AI tools for startups. Yeah. But anything on your mind, Raymond, Todd, or Mark that you would want to get into first?

Yeah.

I do want to say, mention something for Raymond. Raymond, I thought about your, You mentioned you had a screw, um, something with a screw gauge on your, on your part that was, that was out of spec. Um, yeah, yeah, I was going to send you some. I don't know if you're using the thread at the screw as a, as, as location or just as clamping. So, um, both, because I've, you know, doing all these targeters for all these years, like you're targeting, you're at a big distance, you're trying to target a screw going from, you know, 10 inches away. You have to spend a lot of time— like, we use, we use the screw to clamp, but you don't ever use it to locate. It's not accurate enough. And so, and I was thinking about this thing, you know, you have go/no-go gauges that says, yeah, the thread's going to work, the pitch is right, and it's within the range, but the range is big. So I don't know if you— I was going to send you some screenshots of stuff I've done where you, you can use the screw thread clamp, because that's what it's good at. It's just horrible locator, but you can use like a ledge, like for nails, the guide bolt holds it to the targeter. And if you don't hold it to the targeter very well, you're going to miss, you know, you're 10 inches away where you're doing your crosswalks.

So you can do— let me clarify. Um, actually locator is not accurate. Uh, so let me re-hit the redo button. And, but really, I'd rather not discuss this because it's all resolved. Okay.

Good.

It's not so much a locator, uh, issue. It was a fit issue, but we're, we're in good shape. So, okay, I was a little exasperated weeks ago, but now I'm good.

Always. Now it's the world of startups.

Yep, every day. Agreed.

Okay, good. Yeah, I was just— I thought about that.

I was like, well, thank you. Appreciate that. And we're in a good place.

Awesome. Good, good. So last week we had Stephen Flutie Davis on, and he's got a bunch of new AI tools. And, um, and then, so this is just kind of hit me like a ton of bricks, like software. If you're, if you're a company and you're buying, you're, you have, um, um, you're renting software for CRM or I don't know, regulatory filing or anything, you can now get custom software built for you. I mean, like I used to use Salesforce. Salesforce is a giant monster and you can get Salesforce for you for 10% of the price and you can get it in a few days and it actually, it fit, it's built for you and your business. And I mean, this, this, the, this whole, this is like software on the fly thing is really— let me share. I want to share this screen I was sharing with, with Mark earlier. Let's see if I can—

yeah, the old, the old software rule used to be don't build it, rent it, right?

And now it's flipped. So, so look at this. I just got this email Tuesday, and this, this is just There's hundreds of companies doing this. So this company called Pulsia, I've never heard of, they went out and scrubbed me on the internet and they— there's no people involved in this. Their marketing team says, hey, we kind of know who you are and there's 3 software things we can build for you in 3 days for $49 a month. They could build an AI screening tool for Startups, they could build an industry intelligence tool, they could build a job board. I swear, this is where everything's going. If you're a startup and you want to do more with less employees or just be more efficient, you just got to put your hat on and say, if I had a tool, if I had a magic wand, and I could do anything I wanted with, with software, what would I build? And then just tell Polsky to build it for you in 3 days. I mean, it's insane what's going on now.

It sounds like they're competing with you.

Um, yeah, I don't care about that. It's just— that's going to happen.

But, um, but the difference though, I hope is for you is that you validate, whereas they're going to just give you potentially garbage.

Well, you can, but you can train it, right, to get— it's not going to be great on day one, it's just going to get better and better as you train it. You know, give me more of this, give me less of that. Um, I mean, they've got API tools which will go out and scrub LinkedIn and stuff for you. I mean, you can just It's crazy what you can do. So that just blew my mind. I would never rent software like Todd said. I would always custom build software now to do something. And then, I mean, that just blows my mind. I would put your thinking— get your employees together and just brainstorm if we could have any smart intelligence in the company, what would we want? And then build it and pay $49 a month. I mean, what's the downside? You know, $49 a month and you got to spend a little time playing with it. Um, yeah, so, and then that's kind of leads us into Stephen. So let me show you. So you missed Raymond, you missed Steven last week, but Steven's got 4, uh, software tools that he's created for med tech companies, and one of them is a fundraising tool. Um, and let me, I'm just gonna play, hope I can do this. Let's see, I'm just gonna play the video.

We can go back and watch cuz I missed last week as well. We can go back and watch.

Yeah, Steven created a 7-minute summary that I'm going to play. Nice. Yeah, he's— let me see how to do this. Start share.

That's why I called Stephen to ask him if he, as a person without a computer science background, using AI, spent time to build all those things so that the AI built what basically became his software engineer and production company. I said, where's the barrier to entry to somebody else do the same thing with stronger, faster, smarter AIs? And where's your unique advantage going to be?

And I think, and I think just industry knowledge in a niche is probably the only motive.

Yeah, I mean, I was just asking sort of rhetorically. I think he's got first mover industry knowledge connections. There's a whole lot of different things. There's a lot of soft stuff like we were talking about earlier. Sometimes it's, you know, sometimes you have to throw in the art with the science to give it value.

But here, listen to this 7 minutes, and if this gets boring, just tell me to stop it.

Hello, Bonshat. This is Stephen Flutie, the founder of Bakken. Bakken is a healthcare investment intelligence platform First principles, we developed this to make life easier for startups, for founders, for investors, for PE firms, really for the entire, entire industry in a couple of different facets. For startups, how can you identify new investment opportunities for you? How can you do competitive intelligence research and see what your competitors, how much money they brought in, and who those investors might be? And then we've also taken it a few steps further and built out a suite of backend skills that has over 18 skills from helping founders and startups build 510s, being able to help build out value analysis packs, marketing material with a quality consultant built into it. So those claims that we want to put in there are actually substantiated, you know, show you the rules of the FDA that you're violating with suggested changes. So it's not meant to eliminate consultants, but definitely meant to make your life easier and to run leaner. On the investor side of things, we have a database of over 1,500 investors, but not just private equity, not venture capital, not even the micro VCs. We're really focused on being able to show you how many family offices and angel networks and angel investors. We also have a natural search tool where you can search for individual investors at specific firms or in locations or investment title types. Now this parses through over 20,000 profiles, mainly pulling directly from LinkedIn, which is nice because you can search the About Me section, you can search the title and say find, you know, angel investors in Memphis, Tennessee, or all the investors at HealthPoint Capital or Tech Coast Angels. And we'll be able to identify them, it'll show you a list and enrich their contact information. We'll walk through it for a demo. For the investor side of things, how do we make life easier for the due diligence process? Not just from the financial side, but from the clinical side as well. And so where generalist platforms like PitchBook do a very great job on the financial side, they lack in the clinical side. And that's what we wanted to be able to build, as well as we have a database of over 1,000 startups at this point, and it's growing each week. So for investment firms or for M&A teams, you can find new opportunities and see where they're at from here. This is the command center, essentially, if you will,— we'll go directly into the find investment firms. As you can see, we've got a healthy database already. We've got corporate venture arms, family offices, venture studios, accelerators, and this is growing out significantly. I'll go ahead here and click this one so we can look at 406 Ventures in Boston. I click on their LinkedIn. You can see their team. You see the portfolio and any press of those recent about them, their average check size. Sometimes that's on their websites. We try to pull those in, sometimes not. So it's very hard to find those in certain areas. So you can search for, you know, whatever it might be, VCs focused on quality in Boston, Series A investors. I'll move myself out the way. The exciting thing is being able to do people search. This allows you to search for, as you can kind of see here as it's going through, find investor that Tech Coast Angels. What's important about that is now you could actually identify individual angel investors that are associated with that firm. So it parses through not just 20,000 investors, but actually over 800 million LinkedIn profiles. We have 6 layers of AI parsing and ranking to make sure that it's actually those people that they're—

you're looking for.

So let's go ahead and look at the results. We do initial parse to see who they are. If you want to change the search parse way through, you can do so, or you can just click on Find Me, you know, those investors and reveal them. So I'll move myself again out of the way and move up here. Now I can see a former chair IT committee, the investor, the board governance president, member of Do a Deal lead. This is a different firm, but 6 times, another time they were potentially there. So let's just go ahead and click on Spice Your Social. You can click on this and enhance their profile and see who they are, kind of all this fun stuff here. And if I wanted to move out the way here, I can go click on— okay, let's go— this, this Angel. And you'd be able to actually enrich with their contact information right here. Now you get unlimited searches. The different subscriptions allow you to have different enrichment possibilities. So 75 contact enrichments per month. If you need to, you can just add more at any time. You don't need to level up to the next subscription. So that's sort of the really exciting part. Now on the Boccon skills— move myself out the way again— that's where these come in. You'll see 510 Builder, IDE, QSub meeting, FDA response letter, launch readiness, coding guidelines. And these are just meant to steer you in the right direction. This is NOMAD to take over any consultant's needs at all. Value analysis, build submission, you know, it's— this is all the tools that we needed when we were building products beforehand. And we just figured, figured, let's do the same thing and build these out for founders. For the investor side, let's go back to this. This is where you can explore and find new opportunities, new companies that are coming to market. There's their rounds, there's, you know, where they are at, their overview, how much money these teams have raised, funding, patents are being looped into this one a little bit better on the patent search, regulatory, all that fun stuff. But let's go into the research agent. This is if I'm an investment firm, if I'm in an M&A team, if I'm an analyst, or if I just want to run a deep due diligence on a company to know their funding history and their clinical side of things, this is where I would go. So we'll move myself again, click on Mioc. So from here, I could pull in Mioxx information, their total funding amount across how many rounds, their last round, and their investors. Now this is pulled from SEC information and backfill above the press information as well. From there, we've built 4 agents that essentially search and parse through this information and build it with a financial analyst in mind. So you can see the executive summary, who they are, their rounds. This is what our intelligence coverage looks like. You can go layers deeper and see all this information here as well. The FDA analysis, they have pulled in their warning letter, their 510s, whatever that might be. The clinical side of things, how many trials they have going on, how many are active. CMS, which is interesting because now you could look into the coverage information. Clinical evidence, which is the most cited information from here. People that are on their team, on their board. And their patent information as well. So this is a very exciting tool. Now, if I wanted to, you would just click this tool and it's going to bring it to the page and you can export that entire due diligence report, which typically would take days to run. This one just takes, just takes a few hours. So that's Bockin. There's a ton of other tools I'm happy to walk—

Anyway, that's I mean, it's amazing. And that's just— he just started. This thing's gonna get better and better, you know. There's going to be more. It's going to have— find more investors and more matches for you every week. So what do you guys think? I mean, just— it kind of blows your mind. It's not going to raise money for you, or it's not going to create pitch decks, but it can help you identify Targets probably get you 80, 90% there.

I've used it twice today.

Wow. For, for what?

So the first time was for, uh, this Canadian orthopedic company that I'm on the board of. We are doing an RTO and, uh, the one of the, the company, a company that we're acquiring, um, requires us to raise some matching funds in the US orthopedic space. It's a single product sports medicine, kind of, you know, just think bone anchors for something similar, okay? So I went on Bach and I said, you know, we need to raise $600,000 to $1.2 million for a relatively young company Company, a single product, orthopedic space in a crowded field, some advantages, but we have some unique sales and marketing ideas. Who should I go see? And, and gave me this. I'll show you the list it gave me.

I'm gonna put the Bach thing in the chat while he's doing that. And there's a code Stephen gave us, a code called Founders. If you get, you can get 30-day access for free and gave me, gave me this list here, which to me right now it's just a list, okay?

But, um, if you look at them on, if you look at them on, um, on Bakken, it gives names, contact info. It really does a lot of the sweat work already. And then I just used it while you were talking. Let me show you another one. I just used it. Here we go. So my compliance company, which has been, you know, a part-time venture for a few years, less than half a million, SaaS product, very sticky business. In a compliance field. That is, I get 2 or 3 calls a week from interested buyers, but when they find out we're less than $2 million, you know, they lose interest because we don't fit the model. Um, so I said, you know, I'm raising money for my SaaS compliance company, it's below a million, been part-time, I want to sell it after I grow it. Who are my best investors? Angels, VCs, family offices. And it gave me a list. Oh, again, I— the quality of the list, I can't say.

So that's like matchmaking for your needs.

Kind of cool place to start. And some of them have check size in there, which is reasonable, like $250,000 to $1 million. Here's one to $5,000 to $150,000. It's a small group. Uh, anyway. You got to admit, it's pretty cool. And, and he gave me a list of 56 family offices, uh, which are interesting. I mean, they've done a lot of work, or the AI did.

They're feeding it. Yeah, I think they're feeding it every, every day, more, more and more, and it's going to get better every week. So whatever you're looking at today is just kind of a baseline.

Yeah, yeah.

Um, I think it's interesting too. So I think it was 2 or 3 times ago when he was first on, when, when, uh, I— we first met him on this, he was talking about also using it for to find like potential surgeons that would be, you know, first your, your, your beachhead market, right? Your first surgeons to try out your product. And he said that he, he's working on that aspect of it too. And I think that's interesting because that's important to all of us, right? You need your, you want your first users to try to prove out everything quickly so you can either fail fast or improve fast.

Yeah.

Adopters. Yeah.

Adopter, uh, Surgeon Screening Tool, and it's— he feeds it with residency programs, publications, LinkedIn. He feeds it with lots of stuff. Yeah. Yeah, and it particularly helps you find people that aren't— don't have a big name yet, I think.

I have a question. What was— what's his subscription model? I didn't— He went through that really, really fast, so I wasn't tracking.

It's— I mean, I've— it's— he's got lots of products, and, and there, I think there's a whole menu, but it's, it's like $150 a month to $1,000 a month, I think, is kind of the range. I think you can get the— you can get back in, I think, for $500 a month, something like that. So, and you could turn it off. You can do 30 months for— 30 days for free and didn't just turn it off.

Um, so if you're looking for a comment, yeah, um, cool, looks cool. But just today I received probably an AI-generated email, like I get so many of them. Um, somebody saw that I went to the ACA Summit last week. And then they say, they give a quote, the way that most venture capital firms work is basically they'll take you seriously if you come in introduced by somebody they've worked with before, and they won't take you seriously if you don't. Most of us don't have those warm organic contacts. Founders who successfully raise capital aren't only the ones with great connections, They're the ones who figured out how to network and get warm introductions and meetings with VCs. My firm has developed a reliable way of helping strong founders secure those warm introductions. So what you've presented and what's happening in this information age of, you know, AI empowered information is so many digital pieces of information. And I, the sense I get is there's so much noise on the investor side that unless there's a warm introduction, you're not going to get to first base. And I, I, that's my only hesitation. Information is really, really great, but if you, uh, it's got to be the human relationship Um, I'm in the middle of, well, I don't know, 3 or 4 right now, and I could go on for a while, but it's the human relationship that will ultimately prevail, just like most selling situations. So it's good. I'm not saying it's bad. I'm just saying it's not the end-all. I don't know, Mark, you're the sales expert. What do you think?

Well, I mean, I think you got a point. Um, I think there's cert— but I think there's a certain percentage of people that can take any kind of introduction, warm or cold, and quickly warm it up. And those are the certainly the best salespeople that are able to establish what you just said, that human connection, fast.

Yeah, that's a good way to put it too. And that's why you hire good salespeople. Um, the, um, I was tempted to say something, but I want to be careful because I know, Tiger, what you do, and I'm not ready to hire a recruiter yet, but I am in need of a sales guy. Um, but, but anyway, we can talk about that offline. But the, um, There was kind of a cool story, and this may be useful to the rest of y'all. Um, are you familiar with the— this is a bit of a rabbit trail, so if you don't want me going on a rabbit trail, stop me.

Oh, sure, sure, forum, go for it, Raymond.

So last week I attended the Angel Capital Association summit meeting, which was out in Denver. Um, can— are y'all already familiar with that group?

ACA.

I remember you coming, you were planning to come out here.

It is a group of, um, I don't know, they probably were formed 20 years ago, and the intent was to help, uh, angel network leaders be more effective at getting returns and doing due diligence and so forth and matching up with, you know, the companies and so forth. So they have a convention once a year, maybe 300 people. They do all the normal stuff you would have in a convention. And then it's funded by founders that are wanting to exhibit, and then they give you 2 minutes to pitch, and then you have the next 2 days to have a table and an exhibit, and you try to make the connections and so forth. So it was a very fascinating experience for me. I've never done that. It's a culture, it's a certain level of language, it's, you know, the whole— it was educational and The day one was terrible. I did a really, really bad job with my 30 or my 120-second pitch, but I got over, back up on the horse the next day. I had set Nova Perch line apart with a much more compelling exhibit. And then in my case, we're post-revenue, so we're unlike a lot of companies that are pre-revenue, so that in itself distinguished us. But then on day 2 and a half, day 3, um, what happened was this guy connected with me and I learned that he was the connector. And so all of a sudden I had people coming to my exhibit. So it's all about the human relationship, the connections. And even the last 5 minutes, I'm packing up, trying to get to the airport in time, someone comes up to me and says, hey, Brad says I should go talk to you. And so it's, it's the human interaction. And so I felt like that meeting, if anybody ever is considering it in the future, was, is generally good because it's, you know, people relating. And I do think I'm going to have a yield. You know, I had a commitment for $15,000. We'll see if it comes through, but then I'm also getting meetings scheduled and being asked to go to different angel groups around the country. Some, when you read the fine print, they charge you a whole lot of money to go on their road show. Others just want you to show up and fill a slot. So I'll let you know more about how that— what that yields. But it's an interesting dynamic. What I was most pleased by is the University of Tennessee, where I went to school, happened to have two representatives there, and they were casual until they learned I went there, and they almost hugged me. And so I can finally find— this is finally a company I can, uh, point our investors to because their criteria has to be a UT alum.

Wow.

And so University of Miami is the same way. And thankfully I have a member, meaning an investor of my company, that graduated from there who happened to also be there. So I have access to the University of Miami Venture Group too. So it's educational and potentially useful.

Cool. So I'm wondering if, I mean, you're right, human element is really important. It sounds like speed dating, which is, which can work. But, you know, backend may get there. You may be able to say, show me all the investors that have a UT connection.

LSI, if you guys are familiar with LSI, was a huge waste of time and money for me. Because way too much, too many people, way too much noise. This was 10 times better because it's much smaller and more interactive. That's just my opinion.

What was the name again, Raymond?

The one that I went to last week? Yeah. ACA, which stands for Angel Capital Association and Summit. I think they just do it once a year. But if you type in Angel Capital Association, it'll come up.

Here, I'll put it in the— I'll put the name in the chat.

Um, now it cost me $4,000, um, but if it yielded $15,000 upfront with potential, you know, I'm hoping half a million at least, then it's probably worth it and certainly less expensive than what this roadshow thing was going to cost that I declined on.

Yeah, yeah. I've heard this going back to LSI. I've heard it's just, it's, they're just trying to make as much money as possible and sell tickets and sell seats.

Yep.

Charge. They're one of the few conferences that charges everybody, even if you're a presenter, you have to, you have to pay.

Uh, it, it's just too big, not worth it in my, my view. Now, maybe there are people that know how to work it and I'm not one of them, so it was not a good fit for me. Yeah, they're good people, but it just didn't work.

Yeah, got it. So Chris, welcome. Chris popped in late. We're talking about— yeah, we're talking about using AI tools to help startups be more efficient, and we just looked at the backend tool that Steve, Steven Flutie, has just created, which is really, really powerful as a first entry. Yeah, and then the other thing is, you know, there's two people on the call right now that just sent their AI note-taker. So I mean, you know, if you go to BoneChat, if there's something on your calendar, you can use otter.ai. I use Otter or fireflies.ai, it'll automatically attend the video conference and, and write up a summary for you without you even being there.

Yeah, was that mine that showed up?

No, I don't see yours.

Okay, I actually just— oddly enough, I just turned it off because it was going everywhere. I, I, I literally try to use it when I know I'm not going to be somewhere. Like, I have my marketing guy, my VP of marketing was interviewing one of my ASDs and I sent the invite out and I just got the report back. So I was able to at least kind of see what they talked about. So it's, it's good for tools like that and meetings you can't show up for, but they are annoying. Like when we do large distributor calls, it's like everybody's Otter shows up and then you go through to find out like who was actually there because we're sending out like, hey, sign this for join. And it's like, oh, I wasn't even there. Like, okay, so now we're like trying to create a, dare I say the P word, a policy, a process that eliminates people from just having their AI show up and actually get that human touch that you were talking about, Raymond. You know, it's, it's not just with money, it's with everybody.

Let me show you my favorite new tool. This thing is, so I talk to people all day long as a recruiter. So there's this thing called Plaid.

It's—

Todd knows about it. It's like a little credit card.

Yeah, Pocket is another one.

Exactly. Yeah, it just snaps on the back of your phone and it records every— oh, you just hit a button and it records everything and sends you a summary. You could— anything you want. And man, does that save a lot of time on note-taking.

I'll tell you one that's interesting that I use is, uh, Peach. P-E-E-C-H. Are you familiar with that?

I'm not.

So Peach is an app that will allow you to take— so what I will do sometimes is I'll take my notes for my AI, or I'll take emails, and when I'm driving my kids to school, because it's a 45-minute drive, I just play it while I'm in the car., and it reads me everything. So that way I'm like catching up as I'm driving versus listening to sports talk or a podcast or— I mean, of course, after they've told me about their day and after they told me about what they want to do, but you know, on the way home, it's a, it's a solo mission. So I— that's been really helpful because it's, it's, it gains me back almost 2 hours in a day.

What, what does it draw from? What, what does it repeat recording?

So, um, I have it drawing from Fireflies. And then I also can load in which emails I want or which documents I want it to read back to me. You can also do books on it. I've done that on long road trips where I just load a book into it. So it's kind of like audiobook, but like for Amazon, your Amazon Kindles, you can throw it in and it'll read to you. But you can let it pick and choose any platform you're already using.

Incredible.

It's like $30 a month. I mean, it's not cheap, but it is literally helping me. I would— if I had to put a data point to it, I bet you I'm gaining an hour and a half a day on emails.

Wow. That's pretty good. There's a new one that I was telling you about earlier, Tiger, called Lightfield, started in November in San Francisco, that operates like, uh, kind of this Sales Zen project that I was on. Basically listens to every meeting, reads your emails, your calendars, uh, catches action steps, makes suggestions, tracks everything. And then also it has a little section called What's Up Next, and if you click on that, it'll remind you to do all of the dozen or two dozen things that you forgot to do or thought about doing but didn't do. And you can either dismiss them or accept them. It's like having an angel on your shoulder. It's crazy good.

It's like having a virtual assistant that just follows you around and reads all your stuff.

Really sort of is.

It's kind of—

if you value your privacy, you don't want this thing, for sure. So I guess, I, I guess something I want to throw out— you ask, you know, today's kind of open. So I got a call last week. There's a, there's a sports medicine company that is kind of starting to go under, and they got a sports med product. And let's just call it a bone anchor, even though it's not. Single product company entry in the United States. Product really is a good product, but it's in a crowd— it's in a, it's in a crowded field, and the competition is working. It's not killing people, and their sole sold by the cartel, you know, the Arthrex, the Striker, the Zimmer Biomet. So this little startup's been, was trying to compete with a quote superior product and they just, they're just running out of money. They came to me and they said, well, what would you do? 'Cause we're thinking about, you know, finding somebody to pick this up and do something. And I said, well, I wouldn't do what you've been doing. And I said, uh, a product like that, uh, is ideally suited, I think, for, uh, basically fractional everything. Uh, I have a partnership in a lead generation company that we would focus on the sports medicine. I would go to strictly independently owned physician-owned ambulatory surgery centers that do heavy ortho, heavy sports. And are very profit-driven and don't necessarily care which rep is in the room anymore. I think there's a strong trend there that the traditional rep valet, Jerry Maguire, is losing value in comparison to profit. And I would just work on that avenue. There's 500 to 600 of those surgery centers., and just do contract stock and bill. Now, I wouldn't say repless, but mostly repless, maybe a little bit of a hybrid at times.

Are there autoclave trays or just kits?

It's totally disposable. There's no trays.

That's awesome.

Yeah. Yeah. It's a, it's a, it's an off-the-shelf, kinda like a, call it a, a pre-sterile package bone anchor, but it's really not a bone anchor. Um, and so, you know, the pitch went real well. They love the idea. I was just curious of what the feedback might be with that idea. Uh, one of the things that most companies don't do with their independent distributor networks is they don't really have an effective hunter-killer team Hunter being lead generation, uh, just a, a kind of a constant drumbeat of, uh, trying to find people that might actually need that price or that product or that need. Uh, nobody does that. And of course, this also, this technique allows me to totally bypass, uh, that nemesis called the Value Analysis Committee in hospitals. That's killing, killing us, killing the companies, reps, the industry. We just bypass that.

Pushing cash flow way out for startups.

Yeah. So anyway, just curious what the—

what's the—

I think they—

let me, I'll throw in my two cents is that what's their goal? Do they want to get from zero to a million in the US? Yeah, you could probably do that.

Do they want— their, their goal is to stay alive.

Okay, well, yeah, that's a great idea. Yeah, you can get the cash flow positive in the US probably without a lot of, without a lot of people.

Yeah, it's a foreign company. I mean, so, you know, so it's, they just built a lot of, they spent way too much money in development and then decided they were going to go to the great Valhalla of ortho business called the United States and, uh, didn't really understand how expensive it is to, you know, get your piece.

Yeah, the US is the biggest market with the best prices, but it's, it's so noisy. It's so hard to get attention. That it sounds like Ardillon almost, you know, Ardillon goofed around in Europe forever. They had missed starts in the US and they finally got a new team with Aaron Smith figured out the right application and, and really took off. Yeah. So what would be involved in this? So you, they, they've got the product and it's approved to sell in the US, they just need to find customers.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And my goal is, you know, I have a partnership in a lead generation company, you know, based in Eastern Europe and we're, I thought we would just pound these surgery centers and find people that are interested in, price. Because if we took, you know, you take the 30% off the top that you're paying a distributor and your product is as good or better, and it's not necessarily a product that— and it's a, it's, it's a product that each, each user probably represents about $100 grand a year in sales.

So it's a good, you know, Mark, is it something that can just walk into the account on a, you know, Like a distributor could just walk into an account day of surgery.

Yeah.

Yeah. But I want to eliminate that. I'll basically put it on the shelf, you know.

So have you heard of a company called Iberix? A-B-Y-R-Y-X?

No. How do you spell it again?

A-B-Y-R-Y-X, I believe. So they bought The Montage assets. Montage is a bone graft.

Yeah.

Uh, what they have, and I, we were thinking about it with Tiber to put our gel on their platform and we're, they're not ready for us and we're not ready for them yet. Uh, because we're, we're, we're cold storage. Um, but what they do is they have a database of like 5,000 reps and they will— so Montage is on it. I think they have one other product now where any rep in any hospital can have access to it. So it goes on the shelf, or they can walk it in and they scan it with the app that's tied to their program, and you register the sale. And so it's like, in any given hospital, you could have the Smith Nephew, the J&J, you could have name anybody selling montage, and it's just limited to the—

your—

that doctor. So if it's approved in a hospital and you— you're with the doctor, you get it. I, I tell you, we— I tried to basically shoehorn myself in there, and it just wasn't going to work because, you know, as commercial leaders, everything you talk about is our struggle in life, and it's not getting any easier. And I was like, man, this would be like— this would be very forward-thinking. Um, and they're trying to bring on single product companies onto the platform. And, you know, it's, I think you, you know, they take a cut, obviously. I, I wanna say it was like 5%. So, you know, they're like, it'd be like a 35% commission rate and they take 5% and they pay the distributor, you know, whatever.

I'll check 'em out. We, we're thinking, I'm thinking about bypassing hospitals and going strictly to independent surgery centers.

They have those two on the platform.

Yeah, that would be, that'd be a good, be a good discussion. Yeah.

And it's, uh, John Pacifico is the guy who's the CEO of the company. They're, they're a, they're somehow a spin-out out of Canaan Partners. Um, God, they just got, they just raised like, or got, I, I don't say raised, I believe Canaan spun them out and gave them about $450 million. And they have milestones to get to a billion.

Geez.

Almost like a Canaan spin-out company. Wow. Which is what a lot of, you know, like SV Health is doing that now where they're buying the cold closed loop, they're buying manufacturing, they're buying the boxing and packaging and development, and then they're starting, like they started a spine company or bought assets to start a spine company. So it's almost like kind of PE light and closing the loop on manufacturing and operations and regulatory and production.

Good tip.

Thanks.

Great tip.

I put John in the chat there. There's a LinkedIn, man. I want to get John on BoneChat. That would be fascinating.

Yeah, I think that's, that's huge. And I know from my experience, you know, we trauma, we would go surgery centers, you know, for your your wrist and your clavicle, just the basics. They don't need reps in the room. And, uh, and we've— we, we did well until COVID hit. That hurt us for surgery centers. But after that recovered, yeah, it's, it's so much easier and so much better to run that. So it's interesting. I don't— you know, we've tried to work with these bigger surgery center collections, but it's, it's always feet on the street, and you find someone that has access to the surgery centers like Utah is where we still do well, but it's repless, but it's, it's, it's at least feasible compared to a hospital with repless.

Yeah. One of, one of my favorite startups is Arbutus Medical. I'm doing recruiting for them in sales. I mean, that they're a trauma company with zero sales support. I mean, There's never been a rep in because they, they enable surgery outside the OR. So mo— they're, they're basically putting together cheap kits for emergency room departments to, to hang traction or they'll get finger amputations and skin lacerations and stuff. And I mean, they, you never, ever, ever have to be in there. I mean, it's, and it's all kitted. I, I'm, I'm a big fan of kits and no reps. If—

did you, did you find somebody for the Southeast?

Uh, yes, I got the Southeast, the South Central, I got the Midwest, working on the West and the Northeast right now.

Okay, cool.

Yeah, it's, uh, I love that company, and they've gone from $0 to $5 million out of nowhere, and they'll, they'll do $10 million this year. They'll probably do $20 million next year and they have no comp— they have zero competition. I mean, how many people are selling, you know, surgery outside the sterile field? I love those guys. They check the box. I'm a big fan of monopoly businesses where there's just no competition and they're, they're hard to find in orthopedics.

But those are the guys that had like basically the Home Depot drills in a, in a sterile pack for the emerg— for the emergency room, right?

You, you just use a DeWalt drill off the shelf and you peel their kit and they've got pins, screws, everything you need in there. And you put a bag, it's a sterile bag that goes around the DeWalt drill. And, and it's so freaking simple. I mean, it's like A nurse can do it in 5 minutes, can, you know, hang traction for hip dislocation or femoral fracture or something. And it, without the, the key here, the, the is they don't have to steal the Level 1 trauma system's power equipment. That's, that's the, that's the catch. Love those guys. Already got a few more minutes. What else? What else is on anybody's mind?

Have you heard of a company called Insurgical?

Yeah, disposable power. Yeah, I love those. I love that idea. I don't know how the— I don't know if the— educate me, but I just don't see the the financials? Does it work?

Yeah, it does.

Does— wow.

Yeah, I did a pro forma for a hospital system compared to the Stryker warranty plus capital, and the only way Stryker kept the business was to increase their rebates.

Wow.

Or their bribes.

Yeah, that's the problem with little guys. They just don't have any leverage, even if your product's better. Yeah, I'll put the, I'll put in Surgical in the chat.

But I think every OR and surgery center's got a story about the day they ran outta power.

It's a bad, it's a bad—

wasn't sterile or something.

And they get those, they're heavy. Those batteries are heavy and you know, they lose power every time they get autoclaved. It's a, it's a tough one. And maybe, maybe we'll get, do you know the Insurgical people, Mark? Yeah. Maybe we get 'em on BoneChat.

Oh, they'd love it.

And that, and they're, that's an ASC play, right? They're not, they're trying to go where people don't like trays.

Um, not, not really. It's a kind of a— I mean, that could be the underbelly, but it's really a hospital play too. I mean, hospitals have horror stories too, the day they ran out. It's just kind of hard to have too much.

Interesting.

I'll connect you guys.

Thanks. I mean, it seems like a hospital would have that as a backup, you know.

They do.

But, you know, if, you know, if your Stryker sterilized power is not working that day, just peel open an insertical.

I keep reading about how the, the cuts to Medicaid and the Medicaid— the Affordable Care Act subsidies are, and I hear this from my VP Supply and Logistics CFO, friends are just killing hospitals. The shortfalls, you know, where they— maybe last year they had a budget of, say, $500 million, you know, and it's like 20% reduction overnight. Have you, have you, have you heard much about that? Anyway, it's gonna it's gonna bubble up.

Gotta bubble up. Hospitals are, hospitals have a lot of issues.

And that's, this is main hospitals, not to mention rural hospitals, which are screwed anyway. Yeah.

They don't have enough volume to do anything.

Right. The last rural hospital conference I went to this past fall in Pine Mountain, Georgia, the guy that founded the, uh, organization 25 years ago, His name is Jimmy, call me Jimmy, and he got up and said, you know, 10 years ago you guys had 6 months cash in the bank, 5 years ago you had 3 months. He said, now that you guys got 1 week. He said it's not sustainable.

Yeah, I remember when your buddy Joe Colonna came on and told us, you know, largest hospital system in Georgia, and he said He's got to find $30 million in tariff, tariff losses this year. It's like, wow, that's a big nut to crack.

That's right. Yeah. Anyway, I gotta run. Thanks, Tiger. Good to see everybody.

I love open topic days. This is fun.

Thanks.