Kyle Lappin explains how Priority Medical provides engineering services to early-stage medical-device startups on a pure fee-for-service basis, with no equity stakes or IP ownership. Founders get the engineering horsepower they need without hiring full teams, relocating staff, or diluting equity to attract talent.
Chapters
We don't take equity and we're not developing our own intellectual property. We are simply fee-for-service horsepower. So the clients that we serve to this point fall into a couple of different categories. One area is we work with startups where you've got a doctor plus an investor, couple of investors, couple of engineers. You've got people that have an idea, where maybe they've done some work to prove that idea is somewhat feasible and they're ready to do something with their money. But what they don't want to do is start to build out and spend like some of those examples that I gave where maybe you throw a ton of money at 4 different levels of an engineering or organizational chart. You have to relocate people, you have to hope they come together as a team, and at the end you lose 2 of them. In the meantime, you've washed out a bunch of equity because you've got to attract talent.