For the first two days of our SV programme, we covered cleantech-related companies and entrepreneurs as well as venture capitalists, but none of them piqued my interest as much as today’s session with Jeff Gold, a venture partner at Longitude Capital, which focuses on medical device companies. Being a bioengineer-in-training and having the ambition of starting my own medical device company, I found myself engrossed with Jeff’s sharing about his personal experiences in the industry even though it had been a long day. I remember what he had said about why he found working in medical devices very interesting - physicians can only help one patient at a time, but medical device developers - bioengineers - are able to make a difference in the lives of much more people with their devices. At the same time, there is much more risk involved in terms of getting the product to work safely and effectively, since some medical devices such as pacemakers (which Jeff’s previous company, Cordis, used to develop) are critical in supporting and sustaining a patient’s life. Also, medical devices take at least a few years from the design phase to reach the first patient. Not a lot of people are keen to enter this field because of the daunting process of getting a medical device to the market - it’s a highly regulated and capital intensive industry, and people’s lives can be at stake. Strangely, I find that this excites me even more - I get thrilled by the idea of being able to directly help improve people’s lives in such a concrete way. It was inspiring to see Jeff as a fulfilled medical device entrepreneur who has expanded his impact on people’s lives even more by becoming a VC that funds medical device startups.

Having been exposed to a lot of success stories of famous college dropouts hitting it big in the Valley with their software innovations, I wondered about how biotechnology and medical devices companies were doing in the Valley. There hasn’t been much news about them so I had been wanting to meet someone from the medical devices industry and listen to their stories. So far, it seems that most founders of medical device companies have been doctors or engineers with advanced degrees and some significant professional working experience. Have there been fresh college graduates who have been able to successfully start up their own medical device company? Really looking forward to meeting other people from the biomed industry here in SV!

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