The video and transcript follow.

A new and well-received feature we introduced in May 2016 was giving 20 of our guests three minutes to introduce themselves.

Joe Hage: Hi, my name is Joe Hage. I specialize in marketing communication and strategy, lead generation, and website development for medical device and related companies. So if you’re not satisfied with the quantity and quality of your leads we should talk.

Now whether we work together or not, let me give you these three ideas. First is all marketing comes down to three things, which is actually what I wanted to say. Number one is can you be found? So if I Google Markus will I find you or somebody else? If I Google the name of your company, is it going to be an Amazon choice or your website. So number one is can you be found.

Number two is once you’re found will you engage the person? So you got them to your website, if they click off immediately because you don’t look relevant, no one wins. Can you be found? Are you engaging? And third is if you do engage them have you given them a way to easily tell you who they are? Contact form is not exactly the optimal way. There are other things where they say, “I must have that white paper, I will give you my email address for that,” or a chat box which I personally love for a quick engagement.

So number one, can you be found? Are you engaging? And will you collect information?

Thank you. My name is Joe Hage, and I can be of service you can find me at dinner. Okay.

Jessica Boden: Okay. Hi guys, I’m Jessica Boden, I’m the President of StoneArch and we are a Minneapolis-based health and marketing agency. We’ve been in business for 32 years, our founder came out of Medtronic. Obviously Minneapolis is a rich market for medical technology.

We work across the healthcare continuum focusing from prevention to intervention so think on the prevention side therapeutic foods that are proving out to lower cholesterol to 02:03.09, all that good intervention side as well.

We work with large companies: St. Jude, Medtronic etc. but we also like working with really innovative interesting startups. We’ve got 40 passionate people that are really there to make a difference and positively impact health.

What makes us different from other agencies I would say it’s our commitment to help our clients be relentlessly relevant. So whether that’s helping tell a clinical story to consumers or the opposite, taking something that’s really complex and simplifying it and making it matter in a meaningful way.

So three things I would say about being effective in modern healthcare marketing would be your brand matters. I think sometimes it’s an afterthought for startups in particular where they think, “We just got to get something out there,” and it’s really not that important. We live in a brand-driven world, if you are not telling a provocative interesting compelling story from the very beginning, you’re going to struggle.

The second would be strategy before all else. It’s very easy to want to jump into tactics and create things from a marketing perspective. Take the time, do the discipline, understand your strategy, your unique value proposition, your positioning etc.

And the last thing would be get some outside perspective. Sometimes you’re too close to it you need to work with some folks that have expertise that you don’t that can ask the tough questions and help you.

Joe Hage: Let’s hear it for Jess. (Applause). Jeff you’re up.

Jeff Russell: All right well good afternoon everybody. My name is Jeff Russell. I’m the life sciences Industry Practice Director for a company called Armanino. And if I ask by show of hands if you’d ever seen that logo or heard of Armanino before you came to this conference, most people probably wouldn’t raise their hand.

So we are a diversified tax audit and consulting practice. Kind of like a smaller Deloitte, Top 25 accounting firm, I’ve just lost half the audience. But I’m here representing the consulting side of the business and so I just wanted to talk briefly a little bit about what we do, how we can help you and realistically how you can help me. And one piece of advice, instead of three pieces.

So from a consulting perspective we work with companies that are looking to make transformative change through technology. We are a Microsoft partners because Microsoft is kind of where we’ve attached ourselves from a technology perspective. So we resell and implement Microsoft business systems.

Being a Microsoft partner makes it really difficult to come up and give a three-minute speech and not use acronyms, so I’m not going to do that. But basically we bring technologies to the table to help manufacturers and med device manufacturers managing inventory, financial reporting, compliance, manufacturing, electronic device history records, things that people in this room are probably very intimately familiar with.

And so we work with companies, the people we can help are companies that are scaling are expecting profitable growth, rapid accelerated hockey stick growth. Or are looking for systems to help them with that, to help them scale. Companies that are looking to get off of disparate systems and on to a more unified platform. We help those organizations evaluate technology and ultimately implement solutions that will transform your business and give you the tools and capabilities that you need to be successful.

How you can help me is that I’m always looking for people in the industry that are kind of able to keep me abreast of changes. I try to come to as many of these types of conferences and read newsletters, but my patient is manufacturers and my patient is someone who’s having trouble managing the business because their systems are not doing what they need them to do.

And so the diagnosis that you’re able to get out on the field or that you have in your own experience is knowledge that you can bring to me that will help me be more successful.

So my one piece of advice for anybody in the room is that you should have a trusted advisor that’s part of your footprint for where you’re going and where your roadmap is as an organization. Technology should not be something that you’re reactive to, you should be proactive and ahead of the game and it will help your organization be much more successful.

So I will be outside after this session and still at the booth around the corner if you guys want to come by and visit.

Joe Hage: Let’s hear it for Jeff. (Applause). Leo you’re up.

Leo Eisner: Hi, I’m Leo. My company is Eisner Safety Consultants. We specialize in medical product safety and regulatory approvals. Our group does quality systems, regulatory affairs, lots of other things. That’s right.

Mary Brady who used to work at the FDA just joined our ranks, and she worked on the Home Use Guidance. And she did a great job; I worked with her a little bit on it. She also was in Patient Labeling and she’s all over the place right now. So if you need some help with Home Use, she’s a great resource.

I’m heavily involved in standards development. Medical electrical equipment and systems and also home care. There’s a lot going on there, keeps me real busy. So I want to talk a little bit about the standards that are going on.

The first one, very near and dear to me is IC 60601-1. I know it’s a mouthful medical electrical equipment and systems. It on its third edition with Amendment One. It’s going to go through another change. In 2019 there’ll be Amendment Two. A fair amount of changes at most, like about 130 items give or take. It’s going to get voted on in October.

Big new is fourth edition is coming in
2025. It’s a little far off for now but it’s a moving target and it affects you. Every time there’s a change it affects your products so you need to keep up on it.

Next standard that’s important to know about is 60601-1-2, a bigger mouthful. That’s EMC for medical electrical devices. If you have a product that is electrical going to the FDA next year you’re going to have to meet fourth edition. My EMC guys have told me that’s a design change, so if you’re not ready for it you better start now because you don’t have a lot of time. If you’re a home care product you need to meet at this point in time. There’s a lot of home care products don’t know that.

This morning, I think it was David mentioned 62366, the Usability standard. The FDA has decided no more with that. There’s a new version 62366-1 came out February of last year. And that’s the only version the FDA is considering as a recognized consensus standard.

Then the next standard I’m going to talk about it actually a technical report which is a guidance document. It’s not, it’s considered informative and that’s ICTR62366-2. It was published this April and it’s a guidance for the -1.

Joe Hage: Let’s hear it for Leo. (Applause). Carl is next.

Carl Mayer: My name is Carl Mayer, I’m the CEO of Energize Medical and we use our suite of proprietary portfolio or proprietary tools and platforms to accelerate electronic medical products to the market. And right now our platforms are focused predominantly on energy-based products such as radio frequency, ultrasound, those types of things. There was a mention of those products this morning and a few of the presentations, Lilac and Stuart.

And you may say, “Well accelerate time to market, what does that mean?” Well in 2015 our platforms cut on average 17 months in the time it took to commercialize medical devices for our clients.

So what are some examples of those products? One of them is a Class III electronic medical device. It’s an energy-based console with a complex five-fringe 10-electrode basket and sheath catheter. We develop the console, manage the program, plain sheet through clinicals through CE mark and that took approximately 19 months.

Another product that we also completed during 2015 was a Class II product with multiple probes, energy console, irrigation pump, and a hub in order to connect all the probes to the energy console. We completed that one too from clean sheet through clinicals through 510(k) submission all in about 18 months.

So those are just some examples of what we can do with our platform technologies.

Two things I would ask that you consider with respect to your medical devices: one is what is the cost of time to market? What is the value of getting to market one month earlier? When we look at those products I just mentioned, there’s 300 consoles per year that are sold, about 100 catheters per console, and each month is worth about $2 million in incremental gross profit.

The second thing I would ask you to consider is what’s important to you when you select development partners when you’re doing these types of developments? Technical skills, is it the facilities? For me it’s trust. What’s going to happen when things don’t go right during the program? And for those of you who have developed medical devices you know that things don’t go right during every program. So what’s going to happen? Are they going to be there for you?

I really enjoy medical device, I enjoy helping people. If there’s some way that I can help you please contact me. Either I’ll help you or I’ll connect you with someone who can. Thank you.

Joe Hage: Let’s hear it for Carl. (Applause). Moshe, what’s Kosher? (Laughter).

Moshe Engelberg: (Laughs). Thank you Joe for that lovely introduction. My name’s Moshe Engelberg and when I was in college someone asked me my name and I said Moshe Engelberg and they said, “You must be Irish.” And I said, “How did you know? Most people don’t know I’m Irish Catholic.” (Laughter). Anyway take advantage of it when it shows up.

Today 25 years ago I started a company called Research Works so it is a birthday. I’m pleased to say we’re still around. And I started the company out of frustration. I was in graduate school at Stanford and I kept going back to school because of how we did things in health. And I kept thinking McDonald’s gets us to cry over hamburgers and we bore people to tears literally over things that are really important, savings lives. There’s something wrong.

So I kept going back to school learn more and figure out how can we do better, and I started the company in order to do better. So really we exist for one reason, and that’s to help companies in the business of health save more lives and as a result of doing that make more money. There’s always a balance between mission and money, but my contention is you’re in the business you’re in because you care about people and you want to make a difference. You’re saving lives and that gets lost.

So a lot of our work as a consulting practice I head up a company, the company name’s Research Works. And we help again companies, medtech companies, health IT companies, payers and providers, some government agencies like CMS and CDC figure out what makes them different, why should people should care about them. If they’re making products that really satisfy an unmet need and solving a meaningful problem. Or if they’re just doing stuff because the engineers in the room and the company President says, “Let’s do this.”

So we ask the tough questions, we do the research to figure out the answers, develop the strategy, and figure out how to communicate effectively so people care.

So a couple of tips for you to consider. One is because we love we collectively fall in love with our stuff; we think everyone else should love our stuff. So we advocate a thing called ‘Two Paths to Persuasion’. You can get people to care about your product for the wrong reason, not just because of all the things it does, and it gets them in the door.

Second is this idea if you can’t fix it feature it. A lot of companies sweep stuff under the rug like, “We’re slower we’re more expensive” instead shine a light on that otherwise all the energy goes into suppressing it and there’s always value in what we try to hide.

What makes us different? Number one, we love our clients. We’re not going to work with clients we don’t love, and I mean that literally. This is Southern California, you can say stuff like that. And we’re selective so we don’t have hundreds of clients and don’t want hundreds of client. We do have room for one or two more, and our clients we work as partners for many many years: Philips Healthcare, Dräger Medical, and so on.

And the other thing that makes us different is we put a money back guarantee on every project; that makes us accountable for results.

Thank you very much.

Joe Hage: Let’s hear it for Moshe. (Applause). Let’s hear it for Don. That was a test.

Don DeStefano: Thank you. Good afternoon. So my name’s Don DeStefano. I am with LexisNexis Healthcare. And specifically why we’re here today is we offer medical device customers all the way from a small DME company up to a large Medtronic. The ability to specifically target physicians and facilities based on patient volumes for your relevant product. So if you want to call on 15,000 oncologists, you can, or you can use my data to target the top 500 breast cancer specialists in the US.

We can provide that same level of detail for a
ny CPT code or for any ICD 9 or ICD 10 code. One of our latest case studies is we helped a company with a $7,500 purchase, turned that into $750,000 in revenue in their first year. I subsequently saw them at a trade show and they had doubled their sales force. Now in fairness they went from two to four people (laughter) so.

So if any of you had participated in Mike Sperduti’s workshop yesterday, he said three things: Be brief, Be brilliant, Be done. I have given you at least two of those things.

Thank you.

Joe Hage: Let’s hear it for Don. (Applause). Mark.

Mark Arnold: Thank you. All right so I’m kind of out there, this is not the typical service … I actually don’t even really offer a service, I’m with a peer review journal called “Cureas.” We are one of the select journals where all of our publications are submitted within PubMed, the NIH database, which is the gold standard around the world.

One of the things that we do besides supporting MDs with publishing data, is we work with medical device companies and pharmaceutical companies to develop a portfolio of peer reviewed material that supports your technology.

So for those of you guys that saw Nick yesterday, you need peer review papers to get reimbursement. Well before that you need peer review papers to get cleared. You need papers to get reimbursement, and you need papers also to effectively position and sell your product.

So we can work with you and we’ll reach out to our community of practicing MDs to publish papers that document experiences with your technology.

So just a quick example, the most active program that we have right now is with a medical device company in the Silicon Valley. In four months we’ve got 21 peer reviewed papers published for these guys that validate their particular tool for a very specific application. Right. They’re going to be using in their sales and in their marketing to more effectively convert their leads.

So I’ll be here for the next day-and-a-half so you guys just give me a shout if that sounds interesting.

Joe Hage: Let’s hear it for Mark. (Applause). Thank you. Mike … Oh pardon me, Jon you are next.

Jon Speer: All right. So what is the single biggest business risk that medical device companies are faced with? Yap that’s right, it’s regulatory compliance. I mean we all heard David Amor talk earlier about Theranos and their FDA woes. Wouldn’t you like those FDA and regulatory woes to go away?

My name’s Jon Speer and I’m the Founder and the VP of Quality and Regulatory at Greenlight.guru. Greenlight.guru is a software platform designed specifically and only for the medical device industry. Our platform helps you manage and maintain your entire quality management system and a cloud-based software application as well as optimized feature set around design controls and risk management.

So if you care about compliance and you care about design controls, and you care about complying with ISO 14971 Risk Management, then you should find out a little bit more about Greenlight.guru. And guess what, that’s our domain name, Greenlight.guru. If you want a demo, go to the website, click the button ‘Request the Demo’.

I’m curious, how many of you in this room are consultants? Raise your hand. It’s okay, we like consultants. How many assuming are the rest of you medical device people, medical device companies?

Good news, if you’re a partner or a consultant we have a partner program. So you can use Greenlight.guru platform with all of your companies. If you’re a medical device company, guess what, we have a product for you too, it’s called our software platform so you should check it out.

I also have some content to give out. You can go to MedicalDevicesGroup.net, I did a webinar with Joe Hage back some time ago. It was on ISO 14971, Risk Management. You can go to MedicalDevicesGroup.net to get the replay of that. It was an excellent webinar, right Joe?

Joe Hage: I agree.

Jon Speer: All right. And you can also get a free Ultimate Guide to Design Controls and I can give you that today. It’s very simple, if you have your phone all you have to do is text Greenlight to 44222 and you will get the ultimate Guide to Design Controls today.

My name’s Jon Speer, I’m the Founder and VP of Quality and Regulatory at Greenlight.guru.

Joe Hage: Let’s hear it for Jon. (Applause). Mike Stanasek.

Mike Stanicek: Hello everybody. I’m Mike Stanicek. I’m the VP of Marketing of DNK Engineering. We are a contract design and manufacturing firm based here in San Diego but we also have a facility in Singapore.

In addition to our billings in RB, we also have an FDA-registered facility for design and manufacturing of med device activities.

We have over 150 engineers on staff, 450 total employees. And are very unique in that we do design and manufacturing all in one facility, and that’s kind of unique in our space.

We have a team of engineers of over 150 very experienced master level engineers representing all the disciplines you can think of. We also have a very strong quality and quality engineering program to ensure that all the compliance issues are maintained. This includes 501(k) submittals, audits of our sites if necessary for our client, DMRs, DHFs. All those types of things are in place.

Secondly we have a very strong set of program managers. We partner with our clients very closely to really align on the expectations for cost, performance and schedule. So those are very important and we have a very seasoned group of people that do that and we follow a very succinct process for ensuring that all the deliverables are met at each of the gate reviews to make sure the product is meeting compliance, regulatory issues as well as the schedule.

Finally, all of this has to be kind of tied together with really strong systems. We have a glue that we have developed as a proprietary system that ensures that that product is followed all the way from very early design through all the prototyping and manufacturing. This includes developing MRP, design rev control, as well as BAMs that we can actually transfer those BAMs to our supply chain on a global basis.

And in fact if we want to move manufacturing to Singapore we push a button and it happens. So we’re very integrated from that perspective to bring those products to market very quickly.

Finally, we’re very proud of the fact that we have done literally hundreds of commercialization products with clients across many different markets. And we’re most proud about the fact that 75% of our business comes through referrals.

So we’d love to work with any companies that have an opportunity to bring a new product to market, or just want to bring a product that needs a little more push in manufacturing, we can help bring that to bear.

Thank you very much.

Joe Hage: Let’s hear it for Mike. (Applause). And as a point of clarification that is a Bill Of Materials not an explosive bomb, if I’m correct.

Mike Stanicek: It depends.

Joe Hage: All right. (Laughter). Next up, four-time 10xer, John Eckberg.

John Eckberg: A year a year-and-a-half from now we’re going to have a tax, it’s going to be 2.3%. It’s going to be revisited upon this industry. The last time we had
this tax it raised about $1.8 billion. $1.8 billion is a $50,000/year job disappearing from the payroll of some company in this space in the United States every half hour.

It was a terrible tax, it was a bad idea and the people in Washington came to their sense largely because the LinkedIn group run by Joe and many of you others lobbied to have that disappear.

I’m going to need some help because I need you to revisit this in about a year-and-a-half. I also need someone a few people to break out a calculator right now. I used to be a reporter at the Cincinnati Enquirer, business reporter, and the rule of thumb was that if you saw me with a calculator look for a correction the next day.

The way I think we should replace this tax is to allow the repatriation of profits from US companies to come back in the United States. Anybody know what the number is of profits offshore? Anybody want to guess?

No, it’s $2.4 trillion. So that’s the number. So if we allow $2.4 trillion to come back in all at once it can’t happen. So let’s allow 10% of that to come in every year for 10 years. We’ll tax it at 5%. Do we have someone with a calculator going $2.4 trillion. Okay it’s $240 billion that will be coming back into the US, we tax it at 5%/year. What’s 5% of 240 million? Come on, there’s a CPA in here. What is it?

Joe Hage: 120 billion.

John Eckberg: All right, so we have 120 billion flowing into the tax coffers from that. We have 240 billion coming in. Divide 240 billion by $50,000/year job you end up with a pretty good number. If any of you all had your calculators our right now we would know what that number is.

You tax that wage at 240 million, if it goes to … 240 billion if it goes to salaries 23% it’s another big number coming into the treasury. In other words it would dwarf the 1.8 billion.

I appreciate everybody’s time. I wish one of y’all would have broke out a calculator but that’s okay.

Joe Hage: Let’s hear it for John. (Applause). Dennis.

Dennis Kroft: Over the next three minutes you’re going to say, “So what? What does it mean to me?” My name’s Dennis Kroft. I’m Vice President of Marketing & Membership for Life Science Washington. That’s the State of Washington on the west coast not DC.

We’re the trade association non-profit by choice for the life sciences in the State of Washington. We represent almost 700 member organizations. Caitlin Cameron raise your hand. Caitlin’s one of our board members and members there.

So as one of the largest life science associations in the country, therefore the world, we provide a lot of services to the medical device industry. Number one, commercialization. We give pro bono consultations to medical device companies to bridge that gap between startup and commercialization.

We have capital formation. We have our own angel network called WINGS. We have what we call the VIP, Venture Investment Partnership, where we bring in strategic organizations that meet with the medical device companies to invest or partner with them.

We have the WIN Network. We’re very big in three-letter acronyms up in Washington. Washington Innovate Network, it’s a mentoring program. It’s based on the MIT venture program. And what we do is we put startup CEOs with seasoned CEOs and get them along the way. We have over 60 networking events per year, almost sometimes two/week where you can come in to meet the who’s who of medical devices.

June 1st, Life Science Innovation North West, 1,000 people at our two-day conference. It is the largest fully integrated Life Science exposition in North America. So now you’re saying, “So what? Who cares?”

I want you to know that Washington has a very robust support of substantial medical device company … ecosystem. Over half of our core members are medical device companies. Why? What should that mean to you? Well you may need our services come on up to Washington we’ll help you out. More than that spread the word. You know someone in your network who needs our help. Tell them to come to Washington.

About 15% of our members are in Washington, so they don’t have to move they can just come there. So that’s the so what. And I remain Dennis Kroft from Life Science Washington.

Joe Hage: Let’s hear it for Dennis. (Applause). Thomas.

Thomas Meier: I’m Thomas Meier, I’m the Co-Founder of YouCanBiz gmbh, a company placed in Switzerland. For the last nine years I emerged out of a career path in a multinational environment in medical devices industry. Mainly in Europe but I’ve been an expert here to North America as well as to emerging markets worldwide.

Our company is a lighthouse structure meaning that we have antennas and lighthouses in many countries especially in Europe. And we have a dual business model. We work for Europeans to bring them across the Atlantic to North America or through the Pacific to Australia and the other way round to enable these companies making a footprint in Europe.

We work with innovation platforms in three countries and our segments that we work with are dedicated to the health technology industry. We work with small and medium sized companies well-funded or need in need of funding. And also with innovators that can be doctors that have no idea how to make a product out of their idea.

So we facilitate commercialization of new ideas, of material ideas abroad. And we also facilitate the internationalization of disruptive technologies and new companies gathering to, going for new markets and new horizons.

Other than telling you more in details I’m working with two analogies. Our toolbox is a very rich one, but coming from Switzerland you all know that device. And this multitool is exactly what we apply but obviously in another form for any kind of vertical services from idea to marketplace. Whether you need a validation, whether you need a prelaunch activity, a launch or post-launch we are there. And that’s why we call it You Can Do Business.

Last but not least if we work together we have a promise that we keep, and that’s why I’m referring to Stuart this morning. He showed you some socks and I will show you some socks too. So both feet on the ground and we do walk the talk, all right.

So I’m here also for the rest of the event, and thank you Joe for having me.

Joe Hage: Let’s hear it for Thomas. (Applause). Here’s Scott.

Scott Thielman: Thank Joe. That’s better. So we’ve learned from this conference that if you’re a leader in the medical device space with a startup or an established company you face a web of challenges: reimbursement, you’ve got research to do, you’ve got regulatory, you’ve got legal, and oh yeah there’s actually development and production and sales that have to happen.

Product Creation Studio is a development firm up in Seattle, Washington. What we do for our clients is actually let them sleep well at night with a peace of mind that we’ve got their back on the design and engineering parts. Those critical pieces that bring their technology off the bench or off the napkin and towards on a trajectory towards production.

So it’s not just that we provide great user experience design, industrial design, electrical, mechanical, software and embedded systems engineering. And it’s not just that we provide world class project management, account management services, it’s really that we put you at ease. Give you that confidence say, “We’re doing this the right way for this key piece of the p
uzzle so I can go focus and orchestrate the other pieces that I need to do to keep my young medical device company moving in the right direction.”

If you check us out a little bit on the web or other place you’ll see some notable names. There’s big companies like Amgen that we’ve worked with. There’s some notable companies that we’ve been critical in their histories with like Advanced Bionics and in the ultrasound front like Verathon Ultrasound up in the Seattle area. Our partnership with those companies was on key products that actually led to them being successfully acquired and so I feel like we made a contribution to their success.

I’m really excited about the up and comers that we’re supporting. Our work last year with a company called LumiThera was critical as they bring a product that actually is a therapy for macular degeneration to market. It enabled us to win an award at the MD&M West for ‘The Most Innovative Supplier’.

And there’s a company that if you haven’t heard of you’re going to hear of soon OtoNexus that’s bringing an innovative ultrasound-based diagnostic to the area of middle ear infection that is very exciting. We’re happy to be just one piece of their support as Caitlin Cameron the CEO she orchestrates this web of resources that has to get this amazing product to market.

So happy to talk more. I’ll be here through lunch and would love to meet more folks that are in that position that hot seat of orchestrating the magic to get the product to market and we talk about how our design and development services can help.

Joe Hage: Let’s hear it for Scott. (Applause). Next up Ross Bundy, winner of the 2015 Manufacturer’s Showcase.

Ross Bundy: Hi everybody I’m Ross Bundy, CEO and Co-Founder of Nanomedical Diagnostics. And as device manufacturers I want you to think about even the devices you have like your computer or even the devices you guys produce and think about what does that mean in a biological environment.

They don’t always interact, there’s a lot of things you’ve got to do to make that work, especially electronics. The materials you use in electronics like silicon and copper tend to poison and corrode biology and vice versa they tend to destroy the electronics.

Except for us. So we have a new sensor, we were talking about sensors earlier that operates in a biological environment but detects biomolecules and biochemistry in entirely electronic fashion. We use a new material that’s called Graphene, some of you may have heard of it. It was discovered just about 10 years ago. There’s a lot of news about what Graphene is capable of but what we’re able to do is use it like a transistor on a sensor.

And now Graphene unlike any other conductive material is stable in air and water. It will not oxidize but it’s also carbon which allows me to integrate capture molecules into the transistor and those capture molecules drive electronic signals.

So it sounds really interesting and a cool technology and what does that mean? What do I sell? So 10x is a fun conference for me. I started coming here when I just founded my company. My business partner and I had both just gotten married, both just quit our jobs and were leaning on our wives for support and operating out of his garage and we had barely anything to work with when I first came here.

The next year was the first time we ever presented the technology publicly at the 10x Conference and we won ‘Most Innovative Manufacturer’. We had just a few employees raised a little bit of money. So now I’m here today, we’ve raised a little more money and now have 12 employees, and we’re not selling the technology to academics who are enabling new forms of life science to be studied using our sensors, and we have about six publications in the cycle right now.

One of our academic collaborators was able to modify mouse embryos and measure individual embryos compared to their controls through, and understand the expression of those embryos in real-time while they’re still alive measuring one embryo at a time, which in the past had always taken them hundreds of embryos to do.

So it’s an interesting technology, we’re selling now into academia which has been great. Where are we going? Hopefully next year I’ll be able to talk about the success of our first life science product whereas what we’re envisioning is a product that as a 96 00:37:23 can fit into a robot pipette and a single robot can screen 8,000 molecules per day in a drug screening process, which today can take as many as four weeks to do. About 20,000 molecules we can do in about two-and-a-half days and for a tenth of the cost.

But we aren’t going to be a medical device company, we’re a diagnostics company. We’re very focused on Lyme disease, we’ve been studying Lyme disease and what we can do with existing biomarkers. And what we found is using these existing biomarkers we can significantly enhance sensitivity specificity and enable early stage detection, which is impossible today.

So thank you very much, and we’ll be talking to you next year as well.

Joe Hage: Let’s hear it for Ross. (Applause). Next up is Bob Kent.

Bob Kent: Hi good morning everybody. My name is Bob Kent and I’m President of Timmons & Company. Timmons & Company is a full service marketing communications agency. We’ve been in business for over 43 years, and we serve a wealth of clients from Fortune 100 companies down to startup companies and everything in between.

And often times in settings like this people will say, “That’s great, what makes you different than a lot of the other companies that are doing the very same thing?” And it’s a great question, and often times I come back to two simple things: one is that that we think, and the other is that we actually listen.

And as simple as they sound time and time again we’ve had our clients come to us and say, “Boy, I was working with this other team and they just tried to take this cookie cutter approach and give us the same thing that they were giving everybody else. And furthermore they weren’t listening to any of the feedback that we were trying to give them.”

So I think that’s one of the fundamental things that you need to be looking at when you’re looking for an agency such as ours.

Secondly, a little thing about myself. I actually began my career as an engineer so for many years before I took the helm at Timmons & Company I was responsible for business development, sales, marketing, product management and engineering for companies like Siemens and Philips and Taico and had global responsibility for all of these groups.

And so it helps me and my team be able to come alongside of clients like you and be able to understand the nuances of your business and what it takes to be successful.

A couple of things I’d like to share with you as you develop marketing because I know often times marketing is pushed off to the side. I get it, engineering is important, getting your product to market, but I want to come back to a study I read 10 years ago that still sticks with me to this day. In one twentieth of a second people were reacting to websites they were seeing and saying, “Ooh great company. Ooh terrible company. Ooh great technology, terrible technology.”

You get one chance to make that first impression, and if you’re not making a favorable first impression you really need to focus on that.

And secondly it’s about your value proposition. Understanding that you’re speaking to people. Don’t talk about you
r speeds and don’t talk about your feeds, listen to what’s important to them, speak their language and you’re going to have multiple people coming to your site.

So you need to have a user experience catering to each and every one of them. They want to see information differently, they want to process information differently. How are you giving them information and are you holistically looking at that? Are you giving them case studies and the white papers and the information that they want to hear in a form that they want to see it.

And lastly, are you keeping up with technology? A stat that you may not be aware of is YouTube is now the second most utilized search engine in the world. Three billion unique hits every month. People want to understand and process information differently. Are you incorporating video into the use of your marketing materials? And if you’re not, you should really seriously consider that.

I welcome the opportunity to speak to any of you about any of your challenges you might have, and I appreciate your time today. Thanks very much.

Joe Hage: Let’s hear it for Bob. (Applause). Next up is Karen.

Karen Anderson: Thank you. Three minutes, one person, three concepts. First concept begins with C. I can come up here and tell you what a talented and versatile writer I am, or I can get a Joe Hage endorsement and someone that you know and trust can come up and vouch for me. That’s Credibility. And it is the core, it is the one thing you cannot do without when you are communicating what your company does.

How many of you actually have a product or a service that you are actively marketing and selling? Okay, this is special for you.

After Credibility, the next most important thing, the next concept is begins with A, and it’s Audiences; Multiple Audiences. I know that all of you are great at talking to a scientific audience, and some of you are really great at talking to the FDA.

But so much reputation nowadays and so much actual sales is done by talking with CFOs at hospitals, CEOs at a small rural healthcare system. Or even in the case of say a cochlea implant for children, the parents of that child are going to be making a decision about what product they’re going to be implementing. And in that case you need to really be ready to talk to that audience.

That gets me to my third concept, begins with V, and that’s Voice. When you talk with the CEO of a hospital and you don’t want to talk about the wide bore on your MRI system or the number of leads on your diagnostic equipment because he/she don’t care. They care, “Is this going to make better healthcare in my community? Is it going to be affordable? Is my staff going to like it or are the nurses going to bitch?”

They really want to make sure that this thing, they want to hear in their language. They want it to sound like something they read in Forbes or maybe the Wall Street Journal. And that parent who is picking the cochlea implant for their child sometimes you get a PR firm and they write your case studies and you hear the parent saying, “We were so impressed with the increased mobility and acceptance. Our child is now living and thriving in a wonderful life in their school environment,” said no parent ever.

The parent said, “When my child was able to play with other children and jumped in that swimming pool my husband cried.” Now that’s the Voice.

I’m an expert at helping people … I know people who say that they would rather die than write a case study. They will, they will die if they don’t write those case studies. (Laughter). I’m there, I love those rural hospital CEOs. I have people I’ve interviewed who I am still friends with long after the client has moved by.

So yes if you want help with that please get in touch with me I’d love to talk.

Joe Hage: Let’s hear it for Karen. (Applause). Mr. Mike Sperduti is next, and my partner in crime.

Mike Sperduti: Hi everybody. My name is Mike Sperduti and I am the CEO of Emerge Sales. So who here would like to sell faster, more and more profitably? Excellent. That’s what we help our clients do. And we help them do that and see growth in 24 different countries around the world. We’re actually entering Japan this month which will be our 25th country.

Specifically what we do is the gentleman who talked about the new sales structure from the magazine, we have engineered a new sales process that helps our clients get to market faster. And so what we see and what our clients see and why they trust Emerge is because we can actually accelerate growth and decrease selling expenses. It’s a very powerful combination.

What makes us really unique is imagine a sales and marketing company who makes big claims like I’m making and imagine that they will guarantee that work. You give us your money, it’s safe, we guarantee it.

My name’s Mike Sperduti. My company is Emerge.

Joe Hage: Mike, what are you doing in August?

Mike Sperduti: In August I am with Joe, and I’m thrilled to be with Joe because another major need in this space is sales training especially for startups, mid-sized companies. Today is the toughest environment to sell, and so we’re going to teach you how to a seven digit phone number where you have no relationship with in a medical facility and turn them into a customer. The seven specific things that you need to do we’re going to teach you that process, and then Mr. Hage is going to teach you how to use his communication systems to make a better impression on your customers.

Joe Hage: Good job. August 8 and 9, isn’t it? In Philly.

Mike Sperduti: What’s that? August 8 and 9 is that what it is? It’s August 8 and 9.

Joe Hage: August 11 and 12 in Boston.

Mike Sperduti: In okay there you go.

Joe Hage: Let’s hear it for Mike. (Applause).

Mike Sperduti: All right thanks everybody.

Joe Hage: Caitlin.

Caitlin Cameron: Hello everyone. I’m Caitlin Cameron, Chair and CEO of OtoNexus Medical Technologies. And guess what, I’m not here to sell you anything. I’m actually here to talk to you about middle ear infections in kids.

So let me start with this. So who here has either ever had a middle ear infection or has dealt with a child who has had a middle ear infection? So you can see by the room this is absolutely ubiquitous.

Very nearly every child in America will suffer at least one occurrence of a middle ear infection severe enough to have to see the doctor. And the vast majority of those children will suffer repeat occurrences up to a dozen or more in childhood.

Middle ear infections are called otitis media. 17.6 million doctor visits a year are quoted directly to otitis media in the United States alone. It is the number reason for antibiotics in kids, it is the number one reason for surgery in kids.

The last time anybody cared enough to do a full study was 20 years ago, and at that time it was determined to cost us $5 billion/year just in the United States. We think that number’s probably 12-13 billion today.

Our solution is simple
and it is elegant. We use Doppler ultrasound well known and completely safe, and we apply it in a completely novel way to the ear. We are air coupling, this is important because trust me you do not want to fill a child’s ear full of ultrasound gel, much less dig it back out when you’re done so we shoot through air.

Air coupling, point-and-shoot, no pressurization, no pain, and in one to two seconds the physician is given the definitive objective diagnostic data that is required for the instant and accurate diagnosis of otitis media. And in particular differentiating when and when not to prescribe an antibiotic.

So as I said I don’t have anything here to sell you but I do have a request. Please carry forward our message of our simple and elegant, inexpensive and easy-to-use ultrasound device for the accurate diagnosis of middle ear infections in kids.

And also a request for introductions, maybe you or somebody you know has some contacts or somebody inside of perhaps one of the big medical device manufacturers who may be an acquirer for our company. Or in the big children’s hospitals or pediatric practices to whom we will sell our device.

Now we know how to get into these companies and we have contacts but you can never have too many contacts. So any such introductions are greatly appreciated.

And of course like all young companies soon we will open yet another round of funding and introductions to investors are always greatly appreciated.

I’m Caitlin Cameron, Chair & CEO of OtoNexus Medical Technologies, here to share with you our story of our simple and elegant ultrasound solution for the accurate diagnosis of middle ear infections in children and in adults. Thank you.

Joe Hage: Let’s hear it for Caitlin. (Applause). And all the way from Norway it’s Iacob.

Iacob Mathiesen: Thank you very much Joe, that was nice. So I’m Iacob Mathiesen. I’m a founder of a small startup company in Norway called Ottavio 00:49:06. We provide a novel solution for patients with poor peripheral circulation. So these are typical elderly people, many people with diabetes who have clotted arteries. We developed a system which basically sucks blood down into their legs and it does so using negative pressure which oscillates. And we just got our product CE-marked and we’re now testing it in various clinical settings in Norway and the UK and Germany.

And even this morning I got an email from a dialysis center is also using our device. And they started treating a 50-year-old dialysis patient who had a chronic wound. He’s been having a chronic wound for six years, they haven’t been able to heal it because of poor circulation. And he’s not allowed a kidney transplant because of this wound.

He’s been using our device now for five weeks and the email said that, “It looks like it’s going to heal, so the size of the wound is now half the size.” So that could make a big impact on him.

We’ve also tried it on several other patients with chronic wounds and it really makes a big difference to these patients with poor circulation.

I’m here to learn. Of course we want to try and file a 510(k) this year so that’s basically what I had to say.

But thank you very much for a nice conference Joe.

Joe Hage: Thank you. Let’s hear it for Jacob. (Applause).