MedTech Snapshot Podcast

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. ​

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?

What happens when your first company fires you… and it becomes the best thing that ever happened?

In this MedTech Snapshot, Dave Ferrera shares the career-defining moment that shaped everything that came after: getting fired from the very first company he co-founded.

But that setback became the setup:

↗️ He got the opportunity to learn from a high-caliber executive team
⚒️ It gave him the business tools he was missing
📈 Prepared him so he felt ready to found another company

Sometimes your biggest break can start with a breakdown.

Stuart Karten started out designing toys at Mattel—but a career-defining moment came when he pivoted from playthings to patients. In this episode, Stuart shares how the Affordable Care Act pushed his team to go all-in on MedTech, and how a background in consumer design became a powerful advantage in solving real healthcare challenges.