BoneChat #45 - Four questions with Elizabeth Hofheinz.

This is Bone Chat number 45. It's a light week, a lot of people are at NAS, so we're just going to do something a bit different. Elizabeth's going to lead us in a Q&A discussion called 4 Questions. We'll see where this goes. It's all yours, Elizabeth.

All right, hi everybody, Elizabeth Hoffines. Of OTW, Orthopedics This Week, and Hoffines Content Creations. And so Tiger and I, there were just so many questions that one could ask that will hopefully be helpful to you all. And you can help one another dig into things and get some additional insights. So we narrowed it down to 4. And the first one is, what's one piece of advice you wish you had when you were starting out? Another way to say is, what do you wish someone had told you when you were 25, or your older self? What would your older self say to your younger self, rather? Oh, you guys, nothing, huh?

Well, here, I'll kick it off. So this is really, really easy for me. So in your 20s is the time you should take chances because you don't have a lot of kids, you don't have houses, boats, cars. And, you know, most people just get a stable job and they think they're going to be there forever. I think you take all your chances when you're young, and I didn't understand that. I stayed at Smith Nephew for 7 years like an idiot. So that's mine.

Well, I spent my 20s I celebrated my 21st birthday in Saigon as a photojournalist. Then I flew helicopters for 6 years. And I didn't listen to anybody. The one thing I wish somebody had taken me aside is that— and told me that in addition to leading by example and leadership is everything, great leaders have at some point learned to be great followers. And I think I was in my mid-40s before I learned that. That's the one thing I wish I had learned in my 20s.

Um, could I interject? Do you know why, Mark, that it took you until your 40s?

Because I don't listen.

Now you do, right?

Now I do. I learned, I learned that listening is more important than talking. But it just took a long time. And I think the reason it did is that I learned a lot of bad lessons going to the seminary to study for the priesthood before, before anything else. And took a long time to unlearn those things.

Sure. And what do you think that listening has brought to you, brought to the business aspect of your life?

Empathy. Empathy.

Not something you often think about in business. A lot of people don't.

I— if I'm going to, uh, do business with you, I have to know, uh, what's in it for you, how you feel about it, what's the best thing for you. And if I can give you those things, it's more important than anything I give myself.

Great answer. Anybody else?

For me, I think, I wish I would have had more confidence. So, you know, I would go back and just say, like, just, I guess, believe in yourself or believe in your skills or, you know, have the confidence to voice your opinions. I think I was so shy and just afraid of speaking up for a very long time. And I, yeah, I wish I would have started that earlier.

What would change that for you?

It's a good question. I mean, part of it was, you know, I was born during communism and so part of it was sort of shifting of my philosophy instead of embracing capitalism to a certain degree. Um, part of it was, uh, I think having a great manager for a while who supported me and pushed me, really, really pushed me out of my comfort zone, um, and just learned by experience that I can do certain things that I didn't think I would be good at or capable of, or yeah. So that combination.

Thanks, Mark Copeland.

You just dying to say something?

I'm just trying to learn from Maloney. I'm trying to listen more so I could be empathetic.

There you go.

So did we just get one or two additional folks?

Okay.

Uh, Look, did somebody else come in, Tiger? Okay, Tiger. Okay, I can't hear you. You're muted, Tiger.

Yeah, I'm not used to—

sorry.

Yeah, we had 3 people. Sean came in, Andrew, and Chris Wright came in. Let me reiterate what Andrea said. So when I was young, I thought the leaders were really smart people and they just knew more than everybody else. And now, you know, when you're older, nobody knows anything. I mean, I work for CEOs, first-time CEOs. They didn't know what the heck they were doing, but they had the ability to figure it out. They're not scared to jump in. And that's what makes us reticent when we're younger. I think we think people know something we don't know.

Right, man. I, I second that. I was thinking the exact same thing. Everybody else is faking it too, is what I would tell my, my 20-year-old self.

Ah, pretty good.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay, all right, well, uh, let's see, let's move on to the second question. What trend did you miss? Why do you think you missed it? Not fashion trends.

Robotics. Ah, because I just didn't really care.

Okay.

Did you think—

I think it's fun, but I still think there's, you know, there's definitely still a need for the day-to-day products out there. And I think that our industry has put so much focus, and I think it's just taken away investors', you know, their mindset of the other products and innovations that are out there. Because everybody's chasing that robot that's gonna do everything for them. That's my take.

Interesting.

Anybody else miss robotics?

I'm not totally sold on robotics yet, so we'll see what happens.

Yeah.

Well, let me, let me add to that. So we all remember, the older people remember RoboDoc, that came out in the late '80s, early '90s, and it was just, it was a great idea, just wasn't ready for prime time. And seems like technology always takes 10 or 20 years for the 5th or the 8th or the 12th company to figure it out. And Mako was the first one to really figure it out. And now they taught everybody that, you know, robots can do things better.

Um, somebody's got his hand up. Who's that?

Kyle?

Yeah, a couple things come to mind. So first is, um, ceramic on poly. For the start of my career, for the first few years, I spent a ton of time working on metal on metal, ceramic on ceramic, differential hardness. There was so much potential, it was super exciting. And in the end, 15 or 20 years later, we've landed on the gold standard is just a ceramic head on a really highly cross-linked polyethylene, and that's probably gonna be the way it goes in the future 'cause they're really good. Although I'm still hopeful that we will come full circle around one day in 10 or 20 or 30 years and we'll be back on metal on metal. Like all things, it's the circle of life in orthopedics. The other thing I wish that I would've kind of had some foresight for was I was at Ray Medical when they were working on the Micro Nail. I eventually ended up at Sonoma Orthopedics after they had done their flexible nail, and in the middle, was the rise and overtaking of the Volder plate. That the rise was meteoric and felt kind of across the whole industry and still stands the test of time. I feel like I had great line of sight to see how that was going to go ahead of time. And now in retrospect, I hope I've learned from that. But that's— those are a couple that come to mind when you ask me that.

Okay.

So why do you think you missed the ceramic on poly trend?

It was boring. Everything with poly seemed boring. It was one of the first materials used and You know, I had some— when I was co-oping at DePew, there was still rumblings of all that went wrong with Heilamer, and I just thought, man, we're gonna use pink on pink or a super hard cobalt on a shell that's got no screws in. It's gonna be amazing.

And nope.

So sometimes I guess the lesson for me is sometimes boring is good.

Don't give up on boring.

Yeah. Okay.

So what do you, what do you call it when you enjoy risk so much that you jump in too early consistently.

Uh-oh.

So you don't miss any trends.

You don't miss them. I mean, what I— what did Mako get right that, say, you know, Biberon, Esculap, the Europeans got wrong? Uh, besides marketing when it came to surgical navigation.

For example, I think they were the first robotics company let the surgeon hold the tool. Yeah. And it just, you know, per, you know, you hit the guardrail and it bounced back, but it, the surgeon still had control. And I think that's what, that was the secret sauce.

Yeah.

Cool.

I remember the day that George Orba called me and one of my business partners and tried to get us to help him launch this new idea called the Bowler Plate, and we were too busy doing what we were doing, so we said, nah, we're busy. We did okay with what we were doing, but we talked about that for 10 years, and we actually had dinner with him the day he sold his first piece to Pew, and he was telling about the boat he was going to buy the next day. That's the hardest working doctor I've ever known.

Yeah, he's a, he's a force. He's a force of nature. And he is, and his second company is doing the same thing. Surgical Dynamics. It's Hand Innovations 2.0.

Well, when you beat lymphoma, you ignore everything and you travel every weekend, it's gonna happen.

So Doug, Sean, Joe, anybody else miss a trend they would've liked to have ridden a wave of?

You know, one that I thought a lot of us were late on was recognizing the value of bringing the surgeons an entire procedure experience instead of thinking of things one technology at a time. And I think that's ultimately where the companies that were successful with things like navigation, NuVasive with neuromonitoring, some of the robotics companies where they really got it right was not just offering that one technology, but really tying it together with their, their implants, training their sales reps, and really giving the doctor a better overall procedure experience. Much more efficient. And it became a big competitive barrier that when I was at Medtronic, some of our competitors got on it quicker than we did.

So why do you think that you and others didn't quite see the potential early on?

You know, I don't know if it was necessarily that we didn't see the potential. It was more so we didn't see it at all. We we were, uh, organizationally set up to focus on our technologies. Okay, so you had a group that was focused on that implant, that implant's materials, uh, you had another group that might have been sometimes even another division that was focused on what everybody now calls enabling technologies, and, uh, And then you even had multiple sales reps in a room offering different technologies to the reps. It's one of the funny things in orthopedics about the bigger companies. Sometimes they'll have 3 different division sales reps in the room.

So there was no think tank. Sorry. So there was no think tank for outward-looking activity.

I mean, I think if I were to get to the the root cause of the blind spot. It's that we're just not looking at it through our customer's eyes, and we're not being as empathetic as Mark needs us to be.

Mark gets to do a whole class on empathy.

Okay.

Yeah, ultimately, I mean, it just comes down to us focused on our own stuff and not constantly asking, what does it mean for the customer?

Interesting. Anyone else?

Andrew, former medical?

Faceless.

Okay.

All right.

So— Hey guys, sorry about that. I was listening on the side. Yeah, I don't know what trend. Maybe I think vendor, you know, it's kind of, kind of a lame thing, but vendor credentialing was something I don't think I didn't see coming anyway. And, um, right, there's been a whole business around that, which is somewhat frustrating, but, uh, it's real. And, um, yeah, it's interesting.

How would, how would your days look different if you had realized it earlier on?

I just think it was a good business to get involved with early on.

I think, you know, everybody was used to rolling into those hospitals and not thinking too much about it, and it started out as a nuisance sort of, and it was like, oh, you know, this sort of, you know, pain in the butt hospital up in, you know, center city, wherever is, you know, got some type of vendor credentialing thing, and then it just exploded. So, you know, it's one of those things, you know, I've talked to plenty of reps who are like, why didn't I think of this? Or why didn't I think about the rent of scrubs and all the ancillary dollars that are driven from med device via via rep and rep access. And I'm sure there's some other things that, that are to come that none of us have even thought about. Not a, not an interesting business to me, but definitely didn't see it coming to, to the point of the question.

Okay.

Anybody else on this one?

No. Cope's got his hand raised.

There you go.

Okay. Andrew, it's nice to see you, by the way.

Hey, Mark.

Back to the thing I wish I'd told my 25-year-old self is two things. Is find— I was fortunate. I sort of lucked into finding really smart visionary people at two different companies and sort of just tucking in behind them, right? And But it was, it was happenstance. But I, I do it now. I, I look for smart people that are— and there's plenty of them— that are on the forefront of something, and 90% of the people think they're— think those people are crazy. And I think that's the 20-year lag Tiger Buford was talking about. So, you know, some of them are crazy, by the way, but, um, most of them are just ahead of the curve, and Maloney apparently can identify them. Um, the thing I would also tell my 25-year-old self is when somebody puts non-competes in front of you, spend $500 and have an employment attorney look at them because you run the risk of ending up in federal court. Um, and, uh, I would just— I tell every single sales rep, and I think none of them listen to me. Spend $500, get the non-compete that they put in front of you that you have yet to sign, and have somebody explain it to you so that you understand what you're signing. Um, and, uh, I, I, I, I would suggest that everybody here too, by the way. Um, because it is not perfunctory. It is not written with your best interests in mind. Uh, and I don't know if the FTC is going to get rid of them. I don't know. But, uh, the, the places you could end up if you're not careful, um, is, is something that— it, it's $500. It's an insurance policy. You'll, you'll be glad you did. So that was mine.

I think the reps don't listen.

Because they think two things, the reps. So they always, always pretend like they know more than they actually do. Because that's what we're all trained to do. Sales rep. Oh yeah. That's why you just act confident and then go figure it out. Um, plus it's in the way of them getting a job or getting, and salespeople, despite whatever you think, don't like conflict. So somebody puts paper in front of them, they're kind of like, hey, everybody signs, I'll sign it. But anyway, do you want to sign it now? Should I sign here? And, um, and I was probably guilty of that. I definitely was guilty of that in my instance. But they just, like, nobody want— they don't want to think about it, you know?

Um, it's gonna hope it doesn't happen to them.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think people look at it like, oh yeah, the new update, my iPhone or whatever, yeah, just accept it, whatever, sure, right? Like, it's same thing, let's move on. What's it ever going to affect me? And it does affect a lot of people, um, in, you know, so, um, I would just suggest everybody do it. Uh, no doubt about it.

Thanks.

Okay.

All right, so tell us about a day that the shit hit the fan and how you saved the day and your lessons learned.

Wow.

Nobody's ever saved the day. Nobody's ever had a bad day.

Want me to start out? Oh, go ahead. No, Mark's—

Mark's—

No, no, no, no. I, I have so many.

Go ahead.

Uh, so I joined Ellipse Technologies. We had a Precise Nail. It was a remote control limb lengthening.

Product.

And it was 3, it was 3 titanium tubes welded together, a laser weld and an heat beam weld. I was there 8 weeks and we started having catastrophic failures in patients. And this chairman of the board asked me to go to lunch and he said, should we just shut the company down right now or can you fix this quickly? It's like, wow. So I, I hauled all 5 engineers in a room and I said, we are not leaving this building until we have at least 3 good fixes for this problem. And they kept saying, they kept saying, oh, we can improve the laser weld. I know a guy that's laser expert. And I said, no, no more lasers. It's a stress riser. We're not, we're not, we're going to get rid of the lasers. And they said, well, we have to redesign the entire product. I said, that's fine. So anyway, we were in that room for, I think, 14 hours. And I finally unlocked the door after we had 3 reasonable ideas. And in about 2 or 3 months, we had the new one-piece precise nail that, that, that was way stronger. So I felt like I helped that one a little bit. But Elizabeth and I were talking about this. Every company goes through an existential death at some point where you barely survive. I mean, I'm sure you guys have stories, right?

Nobody wants to share. You get to be the hero.

Not, not saving the company or anything, but one of our products. Who— has anyone had a product that's cemented in place with bone cement and dealt with PMMA, polymethyl methacrylate? My first product was a spinal. It was a vertebroplasty cement that was injected into a fractured vertebra. And it was a liquid and a powder, two-component mixture that you would mix in the OR in a little, in a vial and give it 5 minutes to get gooey and then inject it into the spine. And all of a sudden we were getting just complaints off the charts that people were mixing up this cement and it was setting on them immediately. It wasn't giving them the 5 minutes to, to do its thing, and they were not able to complete the procedure. And what kind of— it, it fell on my lap to do the investigations, and because we had so many of them, I, I started looking into it and, um, and found that it— what really helped me was slowing down and, and taking a methodical approach and not just trying to problem solve by the, the backwards way, assume, uh, guess at solutions and then, and then, or guess at reasons this could have gone wrong and then, and then, you know, find experiments to support that. I realized that all the complaints were coming from the East Coast in the summer, and my thoughts were immediately, it's a lot more moist there than anywhere else. Could it be something about moisture? I started looking into it and in the lab designed this experiment with, with multiple different batches of our cement in different humidities and found out that, yeah, the high humidity ones were setting up right away. It was affecting our chemistry. And we had been packaging this powder in polymer bags. And so the simplest solution ended up being to just package it in foil. We already were irradiating it, so it, it was just a simple switchover of our packaging. But this could have been anything. We didn't know if it was our suppliers, if it was our manufacturing. Where this problem was, was happening. And so it was, it was nice to, to do the controlled experiment and get the right answer. I felt, uh, really, really good as a scientist.

Yeah.

Has anybody else ever found that slow down, uh, approach and, you know, kind of gather your information, look at things methodically, that that has really helped you? I see someone shaking his head. Who's that?

Sean, want to comment?

I'm agreeing. I'm agreeing with what you're saying. I've got ADHD, so it's hard to slow down. But, um, no, 100%.

He, he, he—

I think if you can remove the emotion from it And sometimes when you're in the thick of it, that's the hardest thing is actually unpacking that component of it. But I think if you can slow it down and, you know, I guess a bit like what Travis was saying with his example, which well done by that. Just breaking it down and just slowing it down definitely makes, definitely makes a huge difference. But I think it's, you know, from a few of my, experiences, it is about just trying to work, you know, slow it down, remove the emotion and just start working, just start working through what, you know, what the problem actually is to find a solution.

Yeah, yeah, the removing the emotion is critical and obviously something that's pretty tough if you're over a barrel and you've got people, you know, breathing down your neck and whatnot. But you could just invite the whatever it is, the fear, the worry, just, you know, like, okay, I see you, but you're in the corner, you know, stay over there for now. You can come back and visit later, but right now—

Sometimes it's the ego too. For me, if I've got a problem in front of me, I'm, I'm a smart person and I can probably guess what the problem is. And, um, and that's just a good way to waste a lot of time and money looking at, you know, in, in all the wrong places.

Elizabeth, I, I guess I've got a book full of existential death stories like this. So, but it— all of my stories basically start with, um, and what enabled me to survive all of them was reading Meditations by Marcus Aurelius when I was 13.

Oh, 13.

Wow.

And it's still on my bookstand and my office desk today. So Stoicism saved my life many times. The first one was going to the airport in Saigon after a year of writing stories, and with a bag full of negatives and stories and pictures, it was going to create the rest of my life and give me many books. And getting arrested by the police and having all of that confiscated and have yet to be seen to this day. Oh, oh. When I finally got released and got on the airplane going to the airport, I decided to rebirth myself and never look back. So that's when I, I changed my life, and that's, that's when I did something new. So the next one probably was, um, my first year in the orthopedic business, I was the OEC dealer, which was an old company out of Warsaw that was bought by Biomet. And I got fired overnight. I had spent all my savings and my family was with me for the first time. And 3 days later, J&J came calling looking for new dealers and they were changing their format. This— I have a cement story. My first Academy meeting, Dr. Harris out of Boston was experimenting with strengthening bone cement by centrifugation, and I thought, that's a good idea, except that he's using a gas sterilization. Why didn't he just autoclave it? So I built one you could autoclave and sold that to J&J, and that, uh, the next day they fired me. Which was just, you know, a weird existential thing. Um, I mean, at Orthologic, when I was director of sales, I walked into the home office one day and the CEO has all my dealers from all over the country in the office, and I don't, I don't know why they're there.

Wow.

And it turns out he's buying them out, and he says to me, I need you to hire 60 new sales reps in the next 90 days. And I said, We're gonna go out of business. These are the guys that brought us to the dance. This is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. And all he wanted to do was drive the stock price up. So within 6 months, our stock had gone from 52 to 6.5, and the board fired me for, quote, losing sales. And I rebuilt it. And so the next thing was we were building up eTroma with the first digital imaging, and Synthys wanted to buy us. And they asked the question, I'll never forget it, so how much of your company will you sell? And the, uh, the guy, the CEO, Steve Roy, said, we'll sell all of it. And they said, at that minute, the air went out of the room. They got on the airplane and they left. Wow. So yeah, I— that's enough for now. But I mean, these are—

those are great moments.

Yeah, I'm sure everybody's got a dozen.

Anybody else?

We definitely need a Maloney Hour. I mean, there's no doubt about it. We need a Maloney Hour. Holy smokes, I'm not following that.

You know who on this call looks like a guy I'm meeting with next week and doesn't know it? The senior vice president of WellStar Health Systems is a guy named Michael McCauley. He's a great guy. And he looks like Doug Hawkins' brother, or Doug.

Is that right?

Uh, you should look him up on LinkedIn. I saw you on this call. I saw you on this call. I'm going, what's McCullough doing here?

So he's— so McCullough is ruggedly good-looking.

Very good-looking, huh?

Yeah.

Okay, so Joe, uh, Kyle, any terrible days that you managed to, to salvage?

It was just— nope. Okay.

Yeah, sure, I'll give you— I'll try and make it quick. Um, took a job at a startup a few years back, agreed to move my family, sold my house, living in a hotel. Realized the size of the market that company was going after was about 40 times smaller than it actually was. And we were running out of money and needed the bridge loan and all things were collapsing in all directions and it looked really, really bleak. And it worked out. We found a new market to go after. We got to rebuild the team. My family ended up in a wonderful place and it, it now it's, now it's a fun story, but it was definitely one of those things where things are darkest before dawn. And I learned a lot from that experience for sure. Especially better questions to ask up front to try and learn if I'm walking into that sort of shitstorm again.

Exactly. And did, did what Travis did in his situation, uh, help you? Did you do any of the slowing down, really taking a methodical approach?

No, I'm terrible at that, but I'm, uh, I'm like a honey badger when it comes to data. And so I just scoured planet Earth and talked to every human I could find and read everything I could. And just was able to paint a picture that was a little complicated into something more clear and took it from there.

Great. Thank you.

Okay.

Any other— that's another skill that I've, that I've been really focusing on lately is just you gotta decide when to pull the, pull the ripcord and just do it and just move forward with whatever you're doing. Like Kyle, you, you, you wanted to make it happen. And there wasn't an easy, obvious path, but just brute force. And, and knowing when to go into brute force mode is key.

Yeah, standing still is the enemy sometimes.

Okay, thank you.

And our last question, I want everybody to do this. Describe your company in 6 words or less. Tiger will keep the count of words.

Boy, just been spending, uh, so my name, the name of our company is Nova Source. We've been spending the last, before this meeting started, was, uh, determining what a tagline would be for our business, which we have yet to figure that out.

So, um, that's one of my specialties.

Oh yeah, good.

Well, ChatGPT has been helping me, so it makes me look really smart because I'm not very smart otherwise. But, but what we do is it's an outpatient. So really, it's a, it's a primary total knee that we're having disposable instruments that are preassembled in order of the procedure that's going to be different than everybody else's implant instruments to put their primary knee implants in. So, sorry to, my 6 words or less are a lot more than what I was trying to answer. But really, this, it's the, I think it's like innovating outpatient arthroplasty or innovating the future of outpatient arthroplasty. So that's what I'm— that's what I'm— that's what we're thinking about.

So, okay. All right.

Great. Thank you for sharing.

Yeah.

Who's next?

So for Priority Medical, it's engineering horsepower from the orthopedic capital.

From the orthopedic capital.

Okay.

And, and is that something you sort of had waiting in the wings? I mean, you've been thinking about Sort of a condensed, focused—

okay, yeah, yeah, that's, that's kind of a mantra.

Okay, good, good. Um, Mark Maloney.

I have former business partners that still do not know what my company does, and Um, I started VenOps in 2016 to do OIG exclusion screening for medical practices. 99% of the people I talk to don't even know what OIG exclusion screening is, including medical practices. So I can't do it in 6 words. I would hire somebody tomorrow to help me do that.

Well, how many words would it take? Double that?

I don't know. VenOps does OIG. We do automated OIG exclusion screening for medical practices.

That's about what, 9?

That's not too bad. I mean, it's, but that, they don't, but half of them don't even know what it means.

So you're in the business of education too.

I apparently am. I didn't know that when we started it. I thought everybody knew what regulatory compliance was. And, you know, it would be like living in an imaginary world where there's no law that says you have to have auto insurance, but everybody buys it. That world doesn't exist. So anyway, okay, so that's, that, that's a hard one for me.

All right, gotcha. Might be a good idea to think about it and push yourself on that a little more in your free time. It sounds like you don't have much of that. All right, who's next?

Okay, now I have kind of the same problem is that people don't really know what— so my tagline sort of my website is your trusted partner in patent research. But a lot of people don't know what patent research is. So patent information, you know, but it's hard to have it in 6 words.

That's interesting because I would think the people who would be needing your services would have fairly clear idea of what it entails.

Huh. Attorneys know, patent attorneys, but I've been trying to sort of get away from just having attorney clients, and I work a lot with directly with surgeons or, or smaller medical device companies or bigger medical device companies, but who don't have patent attorneys necessarily on their staff.

So if you say—

say it again, your trusted partner in patent research.

I think that sounds fantastic. And surgeons don't really have a clue about what that is.

No.

Yeah, no, very few. And those who do, that's immediately like the, you know, the entrepreneurial surgeons, they immediately see— they love it because they can come to me first to sort of evaluate their idea from an IP perspective instead of going to a patent attorney. But, but yeah, most of them don't know that we exist.

So, so it might be good to have something that, you know, addresses that, two taglines for your different audiences.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay, Travis.

I kind of, I cheated a little bit. Tiger actually helped me with this when we were discussing the topic of my of the, of the webinar I gave a couple weeks ago. I would say preserving investment money through project planning.

That's very good. Uh, so your money's in good hands. Um, we don't spend it willy-nilly.

Okay.

Yeah, it's kind of along the same lines of the slowing down theme that I that I've had going. It's just, you know, I think everybody thinks that they plan a project in the beginning, but there's, there's some, a lot of nuances to it with startups. And so just keeping planning at the, at the focus and not thinking about it as a one-time thing, uh, activity up front is really important to making investment money stretch to the, to the right milestone.

Got it. Thank you.

Uh, who's next?

I'll go, Elizabeth. Okay. This is proof that I should have told my 25-year-old self that my English major would come into play and help. I help companies get their products approved in health systems and ambulatory surgery centers, but I basically, I help companies get their products approved, whatever that is. 7, 7 words, 6 words.

Yeah.

And it's really hard, by the way, to do what everybody's trying to do, which is like I wrote, uh, Andrea was writing, I wrote, you actually, if you were talking to those surgeons or any surgeon, I would be saying, hey, I assure that your idea doesn't infringe on somebody else's.

Right.

Right.

Like it's because everybody gets that. Yeah.

Yeah.

Um, I think it's, it's, um, and Kyle's was good too, because at least I know what he— and they take pride in what they do. You know, it's not necessarily what's the outcome, but we— most people can do the two.

Two.

This, this is, by the way, I think this is extremely hard. And Elizabeth, I can't believe you're hitting us with this. This is a fabulous question, but it is hard.

It is hard, but it's—

and I ground on mine for weeks.

You know, I think it helps shave, perhaps shave off some things that you don't need to be thinking about, or maybe something that you need to say, okay, I don't need to think about that now. Two months from now, we'll look at that.

Yeah. Okay. So yours was, again, say yours, Mark.

I help companies get their products approved.

Yeah. So anybody have any suggestions for, for Mark? Or is that 100% clear?

Some people might—

perfect. That would— that made— yeah, ever since my first interaction with the VAC, that I know exactly what that means.

Okay.

All right, we are, we are taking suggestions. We'll, we'll take it, definitely.

So that—

I mean, have you—

are there people who don't get what you do?

Um, not, not in my target audience.

Okay, well, that's—

you could say into hospitals if you, uh, if it was vague for, for anybody who didn't pick up on exactly what it was, you could say into hospitals instead of approved, right?

Yeah. You know, it's funny though, um, you're right, but I've had to modify it because, um, I've had people say, well, we, we do business in ambulatory surgery centers, so I guess we don't need you. I'm like, yeah, yes you do, right? So it's almost healthcare facilities, but it's not doctor's offices. So I narrow it down to the, like, uh, but, uh, Travis, that's exactly what it was when I started. Exactly what you said.

Yeah.

And then I found some people who felt like, ah, I'm struggling with health systems or I'm struggling with ASCs. And I'm like, it's all the same. So I had to modify it based on sort of market feedback. Yeah. It's a good point though.

All right. Who's next up? Chris, how about you?

I thought that I— the 6 words was, was definitely hard. Um, I, I, I actually, I went and looked at my LinkedIn page because I'm like, I, I already have it set up, so it's Optimalink Partners, but it's linking innovative technologies with medical professionals to create the best opportunities for their patients' outcomes. And I'm sitting here like writing down and I've kind of come up with like linking innovation and opportunity for the ultimate success. And, you know, what I do is I essentially saw a niche inside a lot of these incubators, you know, the TMC and Stanford and other places where these people have great ideas, but they have no idea on how to put together commercial strategy. And, you know, I've kind of hung a shingle now down in Houston, loose connections with Stanford. Starting to develop things here in North Carolina. You know, I have no desire to run Salesforce anymore. But I do have a desire to make sure that some really cool ideas and innovation get to see the light of day. Yeah, it is. I think it's linking innovation and opportunity for success.

Linking innovation. That, I think that's great. I mean, it's, it's not super precise, right? But maybe you need that. I mean, I don't know, any feedback?

I like it.

I mean, I think it works. I still think it's, I still think it's a little vague. I think it's better, and I, again, this is an extremely difficult exercise, uh, but I think if I'm still going, I don't, I'm not sure I know what he means. Unless, unless Chris says, yeah, but every time I say this at the incubators, everybody gets it, then, then it's perfect, right? Um, that's, that's how you— in my mind, that's how I would know. But I'm, I'm— to me, it's a little vague still.

To put into 6 words, tonight is definitely, uh, open up a bottle of wine and, uh, drag this exercise on.

Uh, let's do it.

I, I now have a mission tonight.

I thought I had some other things to do.

I am, I'm going to come back next week with 6 words that explain exactly what I do.

Fabulous.

Here, I think you need to play with the idea of bringing ideas to light or, or to life. Something about that. That's what I would dig into a bit. Yeah. Okay.

Who else?

Here, I'll, I'll go, Elizabeth. So, um, I'm just one person and I do like 3 things. So I, I came up with talent, advice, and community orthopedic startups.

Hmm.

So talent is recruiting, advice is, you know, I kind of do a lot of free consulting, and then community is obviously Bone Shot.

Very good.

Um, yeah, I mean, that's How about Joseph?

Yeah, while Joseph's getting off mute, his presentation last week was terrific. It was really well done.

You got your 6 words.

Oh, sorry guys, my turn. I took a call. Yeah, so ours is enabling cost-effective, dependable cartilage restoration.

Oh, that's perfect, if I do say so.

Very clear.

Did you just come up with that, or?

I did. Wow.

While you guys were talking, I tried ChatGPT. I didn't like its answer, so I stuck with my original.

All right, do we have anybody else? Who do we miss? Wait, who's— okay, Andrew.

Andrew or Sean or Doug. Or Doug, you already did yours. That's right.

I'll go if you like. So we've got, um, the tagline that we've been using is precise reproducible tensioning and fixation for soft tissue reconstructions. So it's more than 6, but there's a few little words in there.

And that's broader than ACL, which is kind of interesting.

Yeah, yeah, we're starting with ACL, but you know, it's, it's The application's pretty broad.

You know what I think? Yeah, live and learn, but I think we should have had everybody type these into the chat so we could be noodling over any possible improvements. Say it again, Sean, please.

Precise, reproducible tensioning and fixation for soft tissue reconstructions.

Yeah, that sounds terrific. That really captures it.

Okay, who do we miss? Okay, is that it?

So we are going to do this again, not, um, in the next, uh, week or two because Tiger's got speakers lined up, but, um, we do have a few minutes left. Tiger, how about I hit them with another, uh Yeah, question 5.

Yeah.

Um, so what is one role that you would not want in your company and why?

Marco, what was the question again? What was the one role?

One role in your company that you would not want and why?

IT.

Hmm.

I've never gone to an IT person in a good mood. I wouldn't want to be on the other end of that.

Too much of a headache.

Yeah, it's all headaches, I guess.

I think, yeah, right.

And headaches that have consequences. No, pull it together.

Yeah.

Anybody else?

Inventory manager. Oh, because, because everything gets lost sooner or later and somebody always has to pay. The other, the other thankless job would be product approval chairman.

Oh, okay.

There's, there's so many bad jobs, so be glad for the ones you have, even though you got headaches with, with these, huh? Um, who else would like to chip in?

Accounting. I hate accounting, you know, accounts payable, accounts receivable. Doesn't seem value-added.

I mean, I guess, guess it is, but it's a bit of drudgery, right?

Okay, anybody else?

Anything related to HR? Oh, um, or accounting or IT or any, any Any of it? None of it. Thank you. Thank you. I may— I may need to go take some Tylenol now.

Why, uh, IHR? What, what is unappealing?

There's so many rules, and, uh, I think so many of us probably on this tend to be entrepreneurial, and I think entrepreneurs tend to not like the rules.

And break them.

Yeah.

Yeah. And that just, I personally, that, that's, that's me, but I suspect there's a lot of kindred spirits here that, you know, hey, the, it's funny. I learned this. My wife pointed this out to me. The minute a company I'm working at has a lot, starts to put a lot of process in place and a lot of HR and a lot of rules. I'm like, immediately I'm like, I'm out. You know, I'm, I, I am out. And I didn't realize, I didn't recognize it till it took my wife to say, do you, you do realize that you have a problem with authority? And I was like, what are you talking about? What are you talking about? She was right.

Interesting.

That's a conversation that has been had around the dinner table for 20 years. She does not play well with process.

Yeah, I agree with what you said, Mark. I, I think my experience with some of those departments is that it's almost like they're, um, they're pre-programmed to say no rather than to find a way to say yes.

Interesting.

You could add, uh, I hate to say this, but you could add quality engineering probably to that role. Quality And a lot of companies, quality are the policemen in the company and they, you know, try not to make mistakes, but they can really slow things down.

I would never say that out loud because I try to keep the quality folks, I try to keep friendly with the quality folks, but yeah, it can be, can definitely be a bottleneck sometimes.

Yeah, yeah. I work for companies where the quality person in the room says you can't do that. You know, over and over again. And then my last startup, we hired a quality person, and she said, she would come into your office and say, anything you need, I will help you go faster. And I said, we love you, you know, I'm glad you're here. So there's different mindsets in quality.

Yeah, quality can definitely be on a wide spectrum, right? You can have somebody that's a wet blanket, everything's a problem, or somebody else that facilitates getting a good job done. It could be— they can be a weapon for sure. So I think what I've heard everyone say collectively is the worst job at a company is to be the boss of any of us here. Is that right? So, and if we all reported to one single human, that human's lifespan would probably not be very long because they, they'd lose it.

Yeah.

Yeah. I've gone through some bosses.

My, my master's program at USC was in counseling and behavioral science. I learned quickly that I can't work for anybody. I mean, just this conversation is giving me PTSD.

Oh Lord, don't call me. I haven't practiced in years. Oh, that's funny. Well, I, I hope it hasn't been too painful, but I hope it's been helpful and, um, Let us know if this is something that we should do again with a different set of questions that will hopefully not bring up too many disturbing experiences or issues.

It was great. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Very therapeutic. Thanks. Thanks, Elizabeth.

Thank you. I'll bring tissues next time.

Great job, Elizabeth.

Thank you. Take care, everybody. Bye-bye.

Thanks.

Bye.