Calculated Risk Featuring CEO George Wallace

Medtech Snapshot ep #120 features local medtech legend George Wallace, CEO of NV Medtech.

Listen in as George shares his story on how he got started and a sizeable risk he took early in his career - leaving a good job with a large firm to enter the startup world. ​

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Read the Full Interview:
[Travis Smith] Welcome back to another Medtech Snapshot, the one question, one answer, a highly digest medical device podcast. With me today is George Wallace. If you are from Southern California and you've not heard that name, let me give you a little education course here real quick.

So George, many people who are from this area may know him from his time at MTI, but the interesting part with his background is where he comes from. With a starting point with Edwards Labs, or as a lot of people from that period know, is American Hospital Supply. Also going into a really early stage startup, which then transitioned into what we know today as Applied Medical, and then starting MTI in 1993.

So I'm really looking forward to this discussion today as we talk about risk, how you take risk, how you evaluate that, as well as funding. So stay tuned. All right, George, so we're talking about taking risks.

You've certainly been in that role plenty of times in your career where I'm sure you've had to evaluate when you say yes and when you say no to opportunities. So you had recently shared a really interesting story with me that I would love for you to share with the folks who are listening, which was at the age of 27, fairly newly married with two young children. You somehow convinced your wife to move from California to Indianapolis so that you could join a pre-commercial startup.

There's a fair amount of risk in that type of decision, especially for a young family. So can you kind of walk us through, why did you take that risk and what did you learn from the experience?

[George Wallace] Sure, Travis. So first, I graduated from Arizona State at 21 years old, and Edwards was my first job out of college, which is fairly atypical for a college graduate.

And Edwards was part of American Hospital Supply at that point in time. I went through a rookie training program in Southern California with the understanding that whatever territory came open, and they wanted me to go to, I would go. I think it was really lucky I ended up getting a territory in Kansas City and took that territory.

Edwards had great products, I had great customers, and it was in the cardiovascular space. So I also got to meet a guy named Jeff Hartzler, who is one of the icons of cardiovascular intervention. He became a good friend, and I got to know the angioplasty space pretty well based on my experience with Edwards and working with people in the cardiovascular field.

So I did pretty well in sales, got promoted to sales management, and then ultimately made the decision to go inside Edwards as the product manager for their biggest product line, which was the Swang Dance Catheter. So I got a great marketing and sales experience along that line. And what I learned in the product management area is that being a product manager is like being a little mini CEO.

Because you have to work with every different department within the company, and you got to get them to all agree on your program. And so I really felt like I had exceptional
training for a very young guy at Edwards. And I think also at Edwards in the early 80s, which was when I was there, incredibly entrepreneurial in terms of how they managed the business and the people that were there.

And a lot of the people in the marketing and sales group ended up moving out and going to work at startups. So it didn't seem so foreign to me that the idea of going to a startup, especially in the cardiovascular field, just didn't seem strange. In fact, it really felt like this was my next step.

And so other than having to convince my wife, it seemed like it wasn't really that high a risk. And I think that's how I ended up making my way to Indianapolis. Yeah, and a fair amount of people make that kind of transition.

You go from a large or maybe even a medium size OEM, and you transition into the startup world. I myself have actually done the same thing. But that transition period when you start in that new job can be a little rough, right? You know, we always joke at times it's when you're working in a startup, you're taking your own trash out.

You're doing your own IT work on your laptop, right? Can you talk with me about what advice you would have for someone who's looking to take that kind of risk today and how to be successful in that new environment? Well, I think first is to try and understand how the environment has changed from what's made you successful prior to that. And I had such great training at Edwards that I was pretty confident. I have to admit, though, it was a shock being the vice president of marketing and sales where you don't market or sell anything.

You didn't have a product at the time we were developing a product, but I did have some experience at that as well. You know, that experience, you know, number one, I was independent. So that that part of it didn't, you know, take the trash out was, you know, fairly normal at home.

So I didn't see any different at work. But what was different was that I ended up being responsible for all of the regulatory and clinical affairs, which was very, very new. And it was a great it was a great lesson.

And so I worked closely with the customers, but I also understood or learned the regulatory and clinical side of it, which was kind of the piece that was missing in my training. Ultimately, the company was not successful. And I think you need to you need to take that into consideration when you're making a decision to go to a startup is what if it doesn't work out? You know, what am I going to do next? And I and I knew I was fairly marketable based on my sales and marketing experience.

And so I could have gone back to Edwards or some other medical device company. And ultimately, this company was not successful. So I ended up having to leave and I ultimately went back to Southern California, California and joined up with Applied Medical, which was basically three X Edwards people.

So I think I was a fifth or sixth employee there. And that was very comfortable. I knew exactly what I was getting into.

I knew the products. I knew the people. And it was it was it was a great transition.

And we ended up being pretty successful.