How nVision Medical was Formed | DU Alumni/CEO & Founder nVision, Surbhi Sarna

To get started, you walked in and you said, wow, this place looks a little different.

Yeah, it looks nice.

Do you want to tell us what class you were in and kind of how you got all started at Draper?

Sure. So I was actually part of the pilot class. So it was the very first one here. And the exact curriculum and everything was still being worked out. And that was 2 summers ago now. Is that right?

Yeah.

And I had just raised— seed funding at that point. So I think I had something like $300,000 in the bank, and we were just building our prototype at the time. And then I came to DU, and I really enjoyed all the speakers, and it was great.

Why don't you tell us a little bit about what this building looked like when you were here?

Okay, so all of this is new. So the Fun, Freedom, Explore— wasn't that all whiteboard before?

I feel like it was all whiteboard.

Yeah, it was a little bit of whiteboard. And definitely no fake grass. That's new. I kind of feel like I should get my shoes off. And the TVs weren't mounted, and there was no parking sign. Why is there a parking sign?

That's a great question. Just the decor.

Just go with it. Yeah, so no, it looks great.

So tell us about your experience at Draper and what you were working on while you were here.

Yeah, so I came in— already having a startup idea and a company that was incorporated and had a little bit of seed funding. And we're a medical device company creating a catheter-based device for early detection of ovarian cancer. And at the time, we were just putting our prototype together and that sort of thing. And I didn't go to business school. So I went to UC Berkeley. Go Bears.

Go Bears.

Go Bears. Only one. All right. An enthusiastic one. And I thought one of the benefits of going to business school is the network that you create from going there and the people you meet. And I realized I wanted a similar experience, but hopefully other people who also wanted that experience of being an entrepreneur or had that goal of being an entrepreneur. So came here to get that experience and got even more than that. The lineup of speakers was amazing, and I'm sure that it still is. You know, as an entrepreneur, the best way to learn how to be an entrepreneur is to go out and do it. Of course, that's the best way to learn anything. But I think the second best way is listening to people who've gone through it a couple of times and who are willing to very honestly share their stories and, you know, share their battle scars and all of that. So, love that. It was really inspiring, and I definitely left here with a little bit more energy and enthusiasm that I had coming in.

So going off of that and what it means to be an entrepreneur, you have a pretty remarkable story in terms of why you started the business that you did. Can you— I know they all got to see a glimpse of it in the documentary, but can you tell the origin story?

Yeah, definitely. So I don't— how much of the story was in there? I don't want to bore them.

Not too much. It was just kind of a clip.

OK.

I think starting— I think telling it from the beginning is great.

OK, great. My journey of becoming an entrepreneur actually began when I was in high school. It's an interesting thing when you wake up in the hospital and you don't necessarily know how you got there, and it takes you a while to remember the last moment. And then you realize the last thing you remember is you were writing a paper in your bedroom for English class. This is my— freshman year and in high school. And the next thing I remembered was feeling a really severe pain in my side. And at that point, I passed out. I woke up in the hospital. And from that point on, it took them 6 months to figure out exactly what was going on. And finally, they figured out that I was suffering from an ovarian cyst. But even though they knew what the cause was, they couldn't necessarily tell me or my parents whether or not that cyst was cancerous. So finally, you know, like knowing that it was a cyst but not knowing if it was cancerous, our only options were to go through a really dramatic surgery at that point and have that entire ovary removed or wait for a few months and see if it disappeared. So it was a 6-month time period where we didn't know whether or not I had one of the most lethal cancers out there. And it was really, really limited options and choices of what to do next. So we decided to wait. And luckily, the cyst dissipated. But from that point on, from the unnecessarily long diagnostic times, the lack of therapeutic options, even once we knew what happened, I realized that women's health isn't where it should be. And that sort of became my mission, is to reinvent women's health. And that's why the companies— called Envision, because when I think of envision, for me it's envision the future of women's health. There are so many disease states that are so poorly understood. And everything I did since then, when I went to Berkeley, my first job, the research I did at Stanford, I always thought, how does this apply to women's health? So everything else I did at that point, I thought, how does this apply to me gaining the experience I need to one day start a company and how does this— impact the arena that I would like to one day go into. So—

And I mean, before you even got here, you raised some money, a few hundred thousand dollars. So what was the impetus for that? You were just like, I know that I want to start this company and, you know, really make a dent in this industry and really bring some, you know—

Yeah, yeah. Well, so after graduating from Berkeley, I certainly thought about starting the company directly after graduating, but in my field, in medical devices, I'm not saying you can't do it without experience, but navigating the FDA, knowing what to say in audits, understanding reimbursement and insurance companies, all of that is quite complex. So again, I'm not saying— if anyone is thinking about going into healthcare, not like healthcare apps, but actual medical devices or pharma, I'm not saying you can't start a company straight out of school, but— There are some nuances and challenges which are a little bit different than tech. So at that point, I decided to go into industry. And first to go into a really big company, so a Fortune 100 company working as an engineer, really understanding process and how things are done. And also to get into the minds of the people in the future I'd hope to collaborate with. So I did that for a little bit, a very short period of time, a little bit more than a year. before really understanding that the big company thing wasn't for me, then joined a 10-person startup also in medical devices and I was maybe 2.5 years into that and at some point even though everything was going really well, I was 24, engaged to my best friend, just really happy with my lifestyle and feeling very blessed, there was still something—

Missing.

that was so just not at all satisfied.

Yeah.

You know, you have trouble sleeping and you don't exactly know why and there's just like something missing from your daily life or some element that's not fully there, you know. And just realizing that I couldn't wait anymore, that my desire to try to disrupt or try to get into this industry and make an impact was so overwhelming. So I was 24, I was not sitting on a lot of savings at the time and So I actually worked full-time while fundraising and it was a lot of work. It took me more than 6 months to raise my first round. The $4.5 million that I raised a year and a half after that was much easier than the first $300,000. But I still remember getting the call from my banker, Surbhi, the money has been wired, everything is in, and walking into my boss's office and quitting. Like I didn't even go back to my desk.

Yeah.

I took the call outside, Then I walked to his office and quit. Yeah, so that was in January of 2012.