Mastering the Pitch: MedTech Innovations from Concept to Market

In this episode of the Global Medical Device Podcast, host Etienne Nichols dives into the art of pitching to medical device investors with Blythe Karow, COO at Neurogeneces.

Blythe shares her wealth of experience, from her early days as a marketer to leading significant product launches and achieving FDA breakthrough designations. The conversation revolves around crafting compelling pitches, understanding investor expectations, and navigating the challenges of presenting complex medical technologies to diverse audiences.

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Listen now:

Love this episode? Leave a review on iTunes!

Have suggestions or topics you’d like to hear about? Email us at podcast@greenlight.guru.

Latest MedTech trends:

1. The convergence of digital health and traditional medical devices.
2. The rising importance of FDA breakthrough designations for startups.
3. The shift towards patient-centered design in medical devices.

Practical tips for listeners:

1. Understand your audience before crafting your pitch.
2. Practice your pitch extensively to refine your message and delivery.
3. Build a cohesive team presentation to demonstrate unity and competence.

Key timestamps:

• [00:00:45] - Introduction to Blythe Karow and her background in MedTech.
• [00:03:22] - Insights into the dynamics of pitching to investors and adapting to different audiences.
• [00:10:15] - Discussion on the evolution of Blythe's pitching strategies over her career.
• [00:15:30] - Blythe's experience with gender dynamics in pitching and advice for female entrepreneurs.
• [00:20:45] - The importance of team presentation and handling expert critiques during pitches.
• [00:25:30] - Blythe's memorable pitch experiences and the impact of audience engagement.
• [00:30:00] - Tips for early-stage startups and resources for pitch preparation.
• [00:35:25] - Closing thoughts and where to connect with Blythe Karow.

Links:

• Neurogeneces, Blythe's current venture in brain health wellness.
• Evren Technologies pitch video
• Medtech Innovator
• Blythe Karow on LinkedIn
• Etienne Nichols LinkedIn
• Springboard Digital Health Innovation Program

Memorable quotes:

• "You want to start with a problem, you want that problem to be in the voice of who would pay for it." - Blythe Karow
• "It's like dating, and you're going to find people you click with and people you don't click with." - Blythe Karow on finding the right investors.
• "Anyone can pitch. You just have to practice." - Blythe Karow

Feedback:

Love this episode? Leave a review on iTunes! Have suggestions or topics you’d like to hear about? Email us at podcast@greenlight.guru.

Sponsor:

This episode is brought to you by Greenlight Guru, the only quality management software designed specifically for the medical device industry. Streamline your process and foster innovation with Greenlight Guru’s intuitive platform!

Transcript

Blythe Karow: The problem usually is that you were trying to explain something simply to a lay audience, and then they come in trying to prove that they know more than everybody and say, oh, there are subtleties here that they didn't mention, and therefore they're dumb, and we shouldn't invest in them.

And it's like, no, I could have a conversation with you about all of that stuff. But it was geared to a specific audience, and so trying to read direct, if you can tease out whoever the expert in the room is, to engage you at a level and try and get them to have a follow up conversation with your scientific team or something at that level, without yourself sounding like a CEO who doesn't know any of the science, that's what you want to do.

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Etienne Nichols: Hey, everyone. Welcome back. Today I got to talk with Blythe Karo, the COO at Neurogeneces, which is a brain health wellness company, and she's leading the charge towards a major product launch in 2024.

Previously, she was the president and COO at Evren Technologies, which is actually where I was introduced to her. I actually first saw her give her pitch for that company, 2021, at the MedTech Innovator, and it really impressed me.

I was really impressed with her ability as a CEO and her ability to present this pitch. So, I've been wanting to talk to her ever since at Evren Technology, she took that device to FDA breakthrough designation in three years.

Previously, she was at Boston Scientific, where she spearheaded the digital health strategy for the spinal cord stimulation line. Like I mentioned, she's just a really impressive person and very well spoken.

And I hope you can learn a lot from how to pitch to medical device investors and what it's like to be a first time CEO. So, I hope you enjoy this conversation on pitching to investors for a MedTech audience.

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Global Medical Device Podcast. My name is Etienne Nichols. I'm the host for today's podcast, and with me today is Blythe Caro. I'm really excited to have her to talk about pitching to investors.

How do you put together a pitch, or how do you go about approaching that whole process?

Blythe Karow: Well, for me, I think my background as a marketer really guides a lot of the pitching your investors in who you're pitching to. There's a different audience every time and want any talk to engage them and hit them at the right level of detail and sort of knowledge base.

I am a biomedical engineer by training, but I think nowadays when I join new medical device companies, I'm the scientific dummy in the room because everybody else is a PhD.

And so, I spend a lot of time trying to figure out what the heck they're telling me and how I can boil that down to the dumbest version of it.

And so that's usually what I focus on and then the arc of the story and making sure that whatever slide I'm covering, what's the next thing people want answered? Because if they're trying to answer other questions and you're going in another direction, they're not listening to you, and so you want to keep them engaged.

Etienne Nichols: How do you anticipate that? Is it just trial by error, or do you just have to keep iterating?

Blythe Karow: Nowadays, I have a lot of experience watching a lot of different people's pitches, and so that helps me. Every investor is going to have different advice on what they wanted to hear next, and so it can be really hard to be concise.

I probably had 500 different pitches by the time I left Evren, and they were all different lengths, different focuses, different ways of trying to explain things, because you're constantly trying to evolve and make sure that you're giving the right message.

So, yeah, there's a lot of trial and error, but I think the standard ones out there are standard for a reason. You want to start with a problem, you want that problem to be in the voice of who would pay for it, and then you want to start backing that up with how your strategy is founded in really good information and how you're going to execute on that.

And its early days, but whatever you can do to prove that you have already been executing on some kind of budget or ability to raise.

Etienne Nichols: Is that something that's changed over? I know the economic climate right now is not as ideal as it had been. Have you seen some of those conversations changing with the economic climate or how that goes?

Blythe Karow: No, I think it's the same.

You have to remember that you're not going to match with everybody you pitch to, and it's like dating, and you're going to find people you click with and people you don't click with.

And I think the hardest part a lot of times for entrepreneurs is to realize when things just gone off on the wrong foot, someone doesn't understand what you're trying to do.

They're never going to get there. And whatever feedback they're going to give you on your pitch is maybe not that helpful, except for the general takeaway of you lost them somewhere, and how could you maybe not lose them next time?

Because the problem isn't the details. It's usually for me, it's that they lost somewhere in the flow and you didn't answer some question. They got stuck on it.

Etienne Nichols: So, you said you had nearly 500 pitches when you left that previous company.

Blythe Karow: I might be exaggerating, but I really feel like I'm not.

Etienne Nichols: Well, I'm sure every pitch gets tweaked a little bit. So, do you just end with V 500 version? That's the version you have, or do you actually have multiple different iterations that you use in different situations?

Blythe Karow: Yeah, you definitely have different iterations that use different situations. First of all, you always should have a version that you can mail out to people that you do not talk track over.

And so, you want your headings to be the takeaway on each slide, and you want to guide them through that story because you can't talk over it if you're talking.

You want to reduce the imagery and things. They have to read down to iconography as much as possible and talk to them so that they're not trying to interpret your slide, they're listening to you.

And that change in how it's delivered is very important. So, you have to have those two different ones. And then besides that, everybody goes through this flow of like they make a deck, then people say, I wanted this other information.

So, you start adding slides, and then it becomes a 30-slide deck, and it's way too much. So, then you hack them all out, and you're constantly kind of adjusting the length of it.

My advice to people is, if they're asking really thoughtful questions where they want to know more about your business and how you're executing, it's okay that that wasn't in the slide, because what that means is you engage them and they want to know more, and you should be having those conversations face to face as much as possible.

But if the questions they're asking you are very fundamental misses on the overall strategy of your company, then you pared it back too much.

Etienne Nichols: Okay, so if we were to just drop you in the office with an investor and you started having this conversation, maybe you're a third of your way on your journey to your V 500, so there's probably things to learn, but you've also gotten pretty far along.

Do you have someone else in the room with you taking notes so that you can engage without. I'm just curious, how do you log all of those questions that may come up because in the moment, you may not remember those later?

How does that work?

Blythe Karow: Yeah, I like to keep a spreadsheet, and everybody has their different formats they like to work in. I'm normally in Excel or PowerPoint, and so I usually spreadsheet where I have the questions and what I think were very good answers.

So, a lot of times when you get into the due diligence, you'll get an email with a couple of questions, and it's really nice to have some articulate things on hand that you can shoot back.

And it also looks a lot better when it doesn't take you three to five days to answer questions, they think you should know the answer to already.

It makes it nice and easy. So, yeah, I definitely keep. I track the questions.

Right now, I'm chief commercialization officer for a company called neurogenesis, so I am not the one pitching. The CEO should always be the person pitching. And our CEO is great at pitching, but I make sure to take notes as she's pitching on ways, we can tweak the wording areas where in the flow.

I had different questions and didn't feel like they got answered, because as you go, it tends to ad lib a bit more and you want to reflect on it. And then I also take notes on whatever the questions were in the room.

It's good to have a second person in the room for that, for sure.

Etienne Nichols: Yeah. What are some of the things that you commonly see people having an issue with, or investors looking at a picture and just saying, well, you didn't do this, this, or this, this common problems.

Blythe Karow: Yeah, well, I'll preface this with, I do a lot of work with very early-stage groups coming out of universities, and so, some of this feedback is going to be at that level. And I think a lot of times you get people that come from a PhD space that don't realize how very different a pitch is to the entrepreneurial community than to a grant board.

And the level of detail, the level of understanding they have about your space. And a lot of times they very basically skip over the pain point and whether they're really addressing that need.

And I think a lot of times in the tech world, the assumption that their solution is the right solution is a big assumption for the rest of us. And they have skipped over a lot of voice of customer.

So, I think making sure you tweak it in that direction and making sure you demonstrate that you have been getting good voice of customer.

Etienne Nichols: You did mention that earlier, too. You said, start with the problem and use it or verbalize it in the voice of those who would pay for it. What does that mean exactly?

Blythe Karow: Yeah, and I have to admit that I recently heard that same feedback from someone else to our pitch, and it really resonated with me, so I reused it.

Etienne Nichols: Yeah, I think that's fair.

Blythe Karow: But, for example, neurogenesis has a product that is going to be marketed to concierge physicians for their patients to do in annual exams.

You don't say the Alzheimer's fundraising community has this problem. What you say is that the number one concern of patients over 50 is brain decline, and they're willing to pay out of pocket for it.

And so that's how you position it, is that there's a pain point for this payer, and we're going to address that because otherwise you start to dilute your story. Who's paying for it?

How is this actually happening? And those are all the questions that the funding people are trying to get answered before they give you your money.

Etienne Nichols: Were there any moments in your pitch career where you thought, wow, I've been doing all of this wrong, or were there any aha moments?

And if so, I don't know if you have any. Was there a story behind that or a situation? I always love hearing people's actual stories from the field.

Blythe Karow: Time when I was doing it wrong. I mean, I think just early in my professional career, public speaking made me very nervous, which people would not expect knowing today, because I will jump up in front of talk, I have no problem.

And I think I'm very much like that chef from Ratatouille where he says, anyone can cook, anyone can pitch. You just have to practice. It is something you have to practice.

You have to get up in front of people and practice it a few times in person, stand in front of people in your office and give the pitch a few times and get the wiggles out and get comfortable with it and get comfortable with the terminology.

It takes a while to start getting comfortable. I mean, you really want to have done your pitch and tweaked it a couple of times before you get in front of any legit investors.

Etienne Nichols: Yeah, go ahead. No, go ahead.

Blythe Karow: I just was saying early on practice, and the mistake a lot of people make is that they don't practice enough.

Etienne Nichols: So, it sounds like maybe, I mean, if you were nervous early on, I'm really curious how that transitioned, because a lot of people I talk to, public speaking is this struggle as well.

But it's kind of like you said, it's just a muscle. And you don't always realize when the pendulum swings the opposite way, and you get excited versus nervous. Is that kind of how it worked for you?

Blythe Karow: It's funny because I will still get on a stage and I'll kick into a talk, and then there will be a point where I realize that my body is having a huge sympathetic response to the fact that I'm on stage.

I might feel shaky. You might actually hear a shake in my voice at a point, and I have to sort of acknowledge that moment and move on from it. And I think it actually, everybody is a bit of a fast talker when they get on stage. I know I suffer from that, and it's a good moment for me to pause and say, take a breath and do this more slowly and just be aware of it.

And okay with the fact that this is sort of going to wash over your body and just got to go with it.

I think some of being aware of that is the fact that at Evren, we dealt with the sympathetic and parasympathetic response, so I was more focused on it.

But for sure, yeah, you're going to have that response, and it's a somewhat healthier response.

Etienne Nichols: That's a good point.

When I think about just getting on stage and presenting information, these people in the audience have Google at their disposal, so they have all the information in the world is what it feels like.

And so, I need to talk really fast, get it all out there, but I don't realize that there's layers of this communication that's happening. It's not just relaying information. And I imagine this is accurate in pitching as well, if not even more important to connect on an emotional level as well.

And so, the pauses and the cadence I imagine would make a difference. But correct me?

Blythe Karow: No. Yes, obviously, very correct. I think that sometimes people try a little too hard to make some story about someone has the disease state and how horrible it is for them.

And to a certain extent, we're like, okay, I get it. Can we move on to what you're doing to deal with the disease state? But sometimes you can really have something impactful.

I think one of the reasons why our pitch at MedTech Innovator was so impactful was actually the video that I started with, which was a video of someone who had used our device and spoke to how he got PTSD in the military, the impact it had on him, and how his quality of life had changed from using our device.

And that did most of the pitching for me.

I do get complimented on my ability to pitch on my own, so I'm not saying that that was all of it, but it is something where I knew when we finished that video that it was pretty spectacular and I was willing to give up a minute to a minute and a half of our overall pitch time just to be able to start with that video, because I knew it was doing something for us in the beginning.

Etienne Nichols: Yeah, I think that's good advice that people could take to heart because it's well done. It looked very professional anyway.

Blythe Karow: Yeah, it's worth spending your money on it. It was 100% worth everything we did to make that video happen.

Etienne Nichols: What about some of the questions you can anticipate from investors? And I don't know, we didn't really talk about this, but I don't know if you want to go into different levels of investors, whether VC versus angel or equity versus seed, I don't know if you want to talk to those or not, but however you want to go with that, are there questions you can anticipate from investors that may not be just something you could brainstorm on your own if you hadn't ever been there?

Blythe Karow: Yeah, well, I mean, I think, first of all, the angel versus VC seed, whatever,

the titles aren't as important as are you free revenue or are you on the market? Right. Like the milestones you have already achieved. And every investor is looking at this from the angle of, is this money going to do something positive for this company? And at the end of the day, am I increasing my money?

99% of investors out there are not doing it 100% out of altruism and don't want to see a return on investment. Right.

So, remembering that these people are customers and we're trying to delight our customers to a certain extent, is very helpful. And so, you have to think about how they're viewing it, and they want to make sure that you are really a thing.

Right. So, show them what your product looks like. Give some way to demonstrate that you're not just a benchtop board with wires coming out of it, that you're being used on patients.

Whatever advances you have made on the tech, demonstrate that in the best way you can. If you can hold it up and show it to them, hold it up and show it to them. Show them whatever traction you have made on a clinical aspect or science that backs it up. Show them that you're a real team that is functioning well together. And so many investors say it's the team. And I think if I were to add to that, it's not that they want the pedigree.

What it means is ultimately they're investing in you and you're not going to get an investment from a guy that doesn't feel like he's your friend. And right back to that, dating. Right. You have to make a connection with these people, and if there's no connection, you're just banging your head into a wall. Nobody's going to say, oh, yeah, that founder is really annoying, but I want to fund the company. This just doesn't work.

Etienne Nichols: That makes sense.

I could see different ways to where you could show that you're not a good team. Like you said, annoying or these different things. The negative side of that. How do you show the positive, especially across your team?

Blythe Karow: Yeah, well, I think honestly, the best way to talk about that is to point out some potential negatives that happen.

The CEO needs to look like they are in charge of the team, and the team respects them.

And this is specific, I think, somewhat to females. If you have males on your team that feel like they need to restate what you said because it wasn't clear to the investors, that's not going to play well. And I certainly have made mistakes in my past in fundraising, thinking that elevating a male on my team or on the board would help an investment, because men get invested more than women.

I think that actually backfired on us, and they want to know who's in charge and who's running the ship and have faith that that team functions well and not in a dysfunctional manner.

And so, you have to demonstrate that. So, a lot of times we'll prep and say, okay, when I get into a known, Marcus, you're my head of RD. So, if I have any questions about product development, I'm going to kick that to you.

But everybody knows to wait until I kick it to know it. Just, you want it to seem as smooth as possible at all times, as smooth as you can make your pitch.

You also want to make the ability to answer the question smooth as well. And you have to be able to, it takes balance. You have to be able to accept a question that you think is completely off the mark and redirect it in a respectful way. And so that also can take some practice.

And I tell people to practice their responses like you would for an interview. It's a star method.

Etienne Nichols: Tell me about the star method. I feel like I should know this.

Blythe Karow: Tasks, actions, and results.

Etienne Nichols: Okay.

Blythe Karow: T and the a are kind of the same, but basically you want to have it, once again, be a succinct 32nd story about something where there are results at the end or something like that.

But you want to have practice responses to things. And to be fair, some of that just comes with practice. And you should be signing up for pitch events and things like that so you can get used to it.

Etienne Nichols: That makes sense. That story that you told about the elevated male in the room maybe trying to cut you off or restate even, that's really poignant. I wonder, are there any other piece of advice you could have, or you have for female pitchers at the moment?

I don't know if there's anything specific there.

Blythe Karow: Well, I think women have a balance of feeling like they're maybe coming across as too feminine, and I don't think anybody should be worried about coming across as too feminine or masculine.

You do want to watch out for not sounding like you know what you're talking about or not sounding assertive. And so, if you have an uptick at the end of things, you say so it ends like a question.

So, you're not sure of yourself, then that's not the great way to end things. You want to end things on a down note. And sometimes when I'm talking to you, I end things as question, as though, did I answer your question?

I have to watch off of that myself. So, I think in that know, I had a friend in springboard, which is specific to female CEOs who had a very high-pitched voice and was worried that it didn't carry gravitas.

And I'll tell you she's doing very well. And what gives her gravitas is the fact that she's kick *** and she has a PhD, and she knows what she's talking about, so nobody cares about the tone of her voice.

Etienne Nichols: Right.

Blythe Karow: But she was very worried and got a lot of feedback about, well, I don't know if people can take you seriously. If those people can't take you seriously, they're not the right match.

And you hear it all the time. You have to do like 100 pitches to get an investment. And the fact is that you're going to have to do a bunch of pitches to a bunch of different people.

You just have to find the one or two that work for you.

Etienne Nichols: Yeah, that's good. I think there are probably things that you have to know, but ultimately, I agree it comes down to your competence. So that's really cool. What are some things that maybe you as a pitch, a pitcher dreaded?

One thing I think of like what about your exit strategy? And a lot of companies I talk to, they want to sell to a strategic before they ever get commercial.

And maybe that's not really what people want to hear when they're investing in a company. I don't know, but how do you handle those questions? Or were there any questions that you really would rather they didn't ask?

Blythe Karow: Yeah, it's not about specific questions, but I'll say there are two things where it's frustrating. One is where they just don't buy into your strategy and try and convince you of a completely different strategy.

And yes, you want to take feedback and evolve if you need to pivot. And part of being a startup CEO is knowing when to stick to your guns and when to pivot.

The other is if you're pitching to like an angel group. This happens a lot in angels where they've got one expert in the room who tells them that you're just completely off base because of XYZ.

And that can happen very often in angel groups, unfortunately. And the problem usually is that you were trying to explain something simply to a lay audience, and then they come in trying to prove that they know more than everybody and say, oh, there are subtleties here that they didn't mention and therefore they're dumb, and we shouldn't invest in them.

And it's like, no, I could have a conversation with you about all of that stuff, but it was geared to a specific audience and so trying to redirect, if you can tease out whoever the expert in the room is to engage, you at a level and try and get them to have a follow up conversation with your scientific team or something at that level without yourself sounding like a CEO who doesn't know any of the science.

That's what you want to do.

Etienne Nichols: Yeah, that's good. What are some of the ways you use to tease out those people?

That seems like it could be difficult, especially if you have a smug smart guy in the back of the room just waiting to pounce. I don't know.

Blythe Karow: I mean, to be fair, often you don't have to do much, because they will.

Etienne Nichols: Okay, that makes sense. I could see that.

Blythe Karow: It's basically just waiting, making sure there's enough time for everybody to ask their questions. I guess.

Etienne Nichols: One of the other questions I had early on I was thinking about this is if an investor, maybe you're like, you are on a roll. You're doing your thing, and someone interrupts your pitch and really completely takes you off in a different direction, I guess, in post or in postmortem, you think, okay, I need to answer those questions before they get there.

Kind of like you were saying earlier, but how do you keep your cool? Or how do you handle those situations?

Blythe Karow: I mean, usually I start with, these are really great questions, because usually they are good questions. There's a reason why they have them. Nine times out of ten, that person is asking questions other people have in the room, and so it's a good thing. Does that mean there isn't the 10% where someone is just throwing gunk in the works and messing you up?

Yes, but it happens. I think if you feel like things are really getting off track, you can say something along the lines of, oh, I have a slide that covers this.

I can flip to it, or we can go through the flow, and a lot of times they'll say, oh, I'm sorry.

Go ahead and keep going.

Etienne Nichols: Yeah, okay. Yeah.

Blythe Karow: But usually I'm like, questions are great. I don't have a problem with someone interrupting the flow of my pitch. Yeah, you have to get to a point where you're comfortable enough in the pitch, where you can ad lib in it and you can take breaks from it, and you can pick back up on the string of whatever you were talking about.

That being said, when I first started pitching for everyone, I wrote out word for word what my pitch was and made it exactly perfect to what I want it to be, and I memorized it.

And then once I got comfortable with the memorized version of it, then I started to move off of that because I wanted to make sure that I was expressing things the right way before I started tweaking things.

Etienne Nichols: If we zoom out, because I'm thinking of you memorizing this pitch, if we zoom out a little bit, because you're also in that moment, I assume the CEO of a company or leading a company in some form or fashion, what does that look like in the day-to-day operations of your work?

Because it seems like that's taken up a lot of your brain space when you're going to pitching. Is that what you're doing full time in that moment?

Blythe Karow: I will say the biggest disruption was to the other guys in my office with me. We had like, a really big room, and they were just hearing me pitch all the time and had their headphones on.

But for me, it gets to be such second nature that you can switch from the pitch back to whatever you're working on, and it's more disruptive to the other stuff I was working on that I had to pull my brain away from an excel program to do a pitch.

But once again, I had just gotten to a point where practice had made perfect, and so I was ready for those things.

Etienne Nichols: Yeah.

Blythe Karow: And if just you're not there yet, you got to do mock versions of it. Get your friends to get on a Zoom meeting with you and pitch to them and have them ask questions and start documenting the questions and come up with the answers to the questions.

It's a lot of prep to be ready to start pitching. And when you're ready to start pitching, you really should already have a due diligence room ready to go. And so, you should have thought through a lot of these questions already.

Etienne Nichols: Yeah, that's good advice.

I'm just curious, is there a time that you look back and you're like, that was a really fun one, like your favorite moment? And I wonder if you could describe why.

Blythe Karow: I think, honestly, my first pitch forever was super fun. Really,

it was terrifying. I love crowd engagement. And so, I got up in front of a crowd of hundreds, I don't know how many hundred and pitched. And to me, that was super fun to hear people come back to us after that, having connected with the story.

To me, that was great. I actually was very sad in MedTech innovator that it was during all the shutdown stuff, and we couldn't pitch in person, because I find that to be really fun.

It is, to be fair, easier to pitch on a computer screen, because if you need to, you can have your script and you can see pitch and you can see the people and do all the things, and it makes it a lot smoother.

And you don't have the ums that I normally have in things or whatever, but the in-person engagement, to me, is always more fun.

Etienne Nichols: Yeah, that's cool.

That's really cool. So, when that happened, what kind of feedback did you get? Was it one of those moments where you're still nervous or were you.

Blythe Karow: Oh, absolutely.

Etienne Nichols: To the point.

Blythe Karow: Super nervous.

Definitely had that moment where I realized my whole body was shaking on stage, even though I had been talking and thought for a split second. Do I remember the rest of the speech?

I guess maybe that's like the one area of adrenaline junkie that works for me, because I hate. I hate horror films, any of that other stuff.

But for me, it's fun to present at this point. But I back that up with at the beginning of my career, that was probably the most terrifying thing you could have told me to do.

Etienne Nichols: Do you think the crowd could tell?

Blythe Karow: Could tell that I was nervous?

Etienne Nichols: Well, I mean, in that moment when you had that, when you could feel your body shaking, possibly.

Blythe Karow: But I don't think it hurts you. I think it humanizes you and lets people connect with you. Especially if you take that breath and then continue and nail it, then people are just like, yeah, get it.

Etienne Nichols: Very cool.

I don't know how many different pitches you've made for different companies or whatever, but is there a template you use or something like that? I'm always looking for things that we can give to our audience as tools that they can kind of use, or do you recommend not doing that at all?

What are your thoughts or recommendations?

Blythe Karow: I don't really have a specific template, mostly because every pitch has a different time length that you have to do. And so sometimes you just can't include all the information you have to figure out what best tells your story.

One of the best examples of that actually is in MedTech Innovator, the video contest, which, not to be confused with the video I used at the beginning of the pitch, but everyone did win for best video and the storytelling, and trying to get it under the time limit and fit all the pieces you needed to tell a good story was different for every company because you only had so much time.

So my first pitch ever, my first foray into entrepreneurialism, which did not work, but I still think it's an amazing idea, was a company called Cardio Boost, was when I was a Zumba instructor and thought we should have wearables in the group workout class to track us and see how we're syncing with the instructor and all that stuff.

And I literally just found the pitch the other day on YouTube where it was like one of those weekend things where you got together a team and made a pitch.

We did very well in it. I mean, people loved the idea. We couldn't figure out how to get the science to work at the time. It was like over a decade ago.

Etienne Nichols: Maybe it'll work.

Blythe Karow: So. But you want to inspire people with an idea, right? Like, this will be fun and engage people in a workout space and drive people to the gym. Or you need to have some way of proving that it's not just your idea, but the rest of the world agrees with you that this is a great idea.

It either has to be so intuitive that everybody gets it, or you have a way of demonstrating that someone else that is a well-established person, is excited or something.

Right.

You have to have thought through the usefulness of it. You have to establish yourself as someone who can help make it happen. And then from there it's all details.

Etienne Nichols: Cool. You mentioned working with little incubator or startups or kind of talking to them. I don't know, advising. I don't exactly know your role there.

Blythe Karow: Yeah, I do a lot of entrepreneurs in residence and advising, and I work with a few different universities, my alma maters, and some local and other. So yeah, it's fun for me.

I like to give back that way.

Etienne Nichols: How does that conversation start? When you first start talking to those little companies, are there specific questions they typically come to you with?

Blythe Karow: It really depends on the format. So, it can be everything from helping figure out who needs the micro grant to get to the next stage, to helping them figure out are they ready to go from research to a company idea market evaluation, or it can be very specific to their pitch and how they're communicating.

And sometimes I'm just an advisor to the CEO on things that are popping up strategically. So, it really varies. But what I do find a lot of times, and I think we already touched on this a little bit, was that they struggle to change from being a person who talks like a scientist to other scientists, to being someone who can boil things down and sell a story. And as much as the science has to be there and you have to be a team that's executing, you're still selling a story, and you have to have that ability to work on that ability.

Etienne Nichols: That's something we talk a lot about on this podcast, is being able to sweep because we speak to a lot of quality and regulatory professionals and making sure that you can speak the language of other departments.

It sounds like that's another just skill that you have to have as the leader of a company is to be able to speak the language of the audience that you're.

Or knowing the audience that you're speaking to.

Blythe Karow: Absolutely. I mean, anything you do in life, in business, and probably other things as well, you need to pay attention to who your audience is and geared things to your audience.

When you're a parent and you're talking to a four-year-old, you're going to explain it differently than you talk to the head of a medical department at university. And people just need to keep that in mind at all times.

Etienne Nichols: Yeah, that makes sense. What other piece of advice, or any last parting advice do you have? If a company is getting ready to pitch to their first VC and they're nervous, any piece of advice that you have as we kind of close it.

Blythe Karow: Up, if you really are nervous about it, there are a lot of good programs out there to help you get ready in your due diligence room and your pitch and ready to get to that fundraising, and a few that come to mind are springboard.

If you're specifically a female entrepreneur, the Aspire program is really good. There are so many that I could make an exhaustive list, I'm sure. But there are a lot of programs out there that can help you review your due diligence room and get ready for that.

What I advise you to do is ask them some serious questions about what they provide you in order to get ready. If you're really new to this, you need an example due diligence room, so you can copy that due diligence room and make your version of it.

And you need the example deck, whatever. And so, make sure they're giving you the tools you need. And it's not a fluff layer, but really in-depth help.

Etienne Nichols: Okay.

We'll put links in the show notes to springboard the Aspire program.

Do you have your example deck or, I don't know, video of you pitching that you're really proud of? Maybe we could put a link in there as well somewhere.

Blythe Karow: Well, I mean, I think if we can find the MedTech innovator video, that's probably a pretty solid one for how we conveyed what the company could do very succinctly. I'm sure there are videos elsewhere.

I hesitate to try and dig them up.

Etienne Nichols: No, that's okay. I'll see if I can dig that one up. We're usually pretty good at finding what we need to find.

Very cool. Thank you so much. Where can people find you and get a hold of you?

Blythe Karow: LinkedIn. It's not hard to google me. I think I might be the only Blythe tarot in the world, so unfortunately, I can't get around it.

Etienne Nichols: I might be right there with you with the only, I guess.

All right, very cool. It's been really great talking to you, Blythe. I'm excited to see the future where you go. Thank you so much for sharing your insights today.

Blythe Karow: Thanks for having me. It was really fun.

Etienne Nichols: All right, take care.

Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, can I ask a special favor from you? Can you leave us a review on iTunes? I know most of us have never done that before, but if you're listening on the phone, look at the iTunes app. Scroll down to the bottom where it says leave a review. It's actually really easy. Same thing with computer. Just look for that leave a review button. This helps others find us and it lets us know how we're doing. Also, I'd personally love to hear from you on LinkedIn. Reach out to me. I read and respond to every message because hearing your feedback is the only way I'm going to get better. Thanks again for listening and we'll see you next time.

About the Global Medical Device Podcast:

The Global Medical Device Podcast powered by Greenlight Guru is where today's brightest minds in the medical device industry go to get their most useful and actionable insider knowledge, direct from some of the world's leading medical device experts and companies.

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