Stuart Karten - The Suprise Question

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.

Travis: 
Welcome back to the Med Tech Snapshot podcast, the One question, one answer digest discussion surrounding all things medical device. Today we're covering an interesting topic with our guests where we asked them a surprise question, one in which they had no time to prepare for. That question is share with us a breakthrough moment, a defining moment in your career, which when looking back on it, was the catalyst for where you are today. 

I personally love this portion of the interview because it really leads us through a candid look under the proverbial hood of our guest in their career, along with the decisions that they made and how they got to where they are today. 

All right, Stewart, so I got a third question for you here. I know you weren't expecting this, so we'll have a little fun. You know, look, you ran a successful business for 40 plus years. I mean, that's a great testament to the work that you all were doing. So I'm curious, if you look back on your career, can you share with us a breakthrough moment where you look back on that moment and that was a catalyst for driving your success there? After that, is there anything that you can share that that really, you know, it, it was a pivot moment and what happened there and, and what was the outcome? 

Stuart: 
Yeah, that's kind of easy. So, you know, we, you know, I started out my own career at Mattel doing toys and then I gravitated towards medical. So when the Affordable Care Act came out, we were doing about 60% Med device, 40% consumer. And then all of a sudden, we're being told that medical devices are going to be put into the hands of lay people, right, because of the Affordable Care Act and moving from clinical setting into the home setting. 

And we saw this as a really great opportunity to take what we've learned about designing and developing consumer products and actually embracing that when it comes to designing medical devices. 

So at that point, we went all in 100% on regulated medical devices. And I think it was a great decision. Part of it was that designing consumer products have become commoditized. You could go to China and a factory would show you designs till you're happy. 

So you know, and the other way I put it is unfortunately in the healthcare space, there's just a lot of problems to solve. And that's what that's what we've been able to partially do over the over the last few years.