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Connect with Dr. David Albert:

About the Guest:

David Albert, MD,
Founder at AliveCor Inc.

David E. Albert, MD, an Oklahoma native, is a physician, inventor, and serial entrepreneur who has developed life-saving technologies and products over the last 30 years, turning a number of those innovations into tech startups. Today, he is the founder of three technology companies, InnovAlarm, Lifetone Technology, and AliveCor. His previous startups include Corazonix Corp (sold to Arrhythmia Research Technology) and Data Critical (sold to GE). Dr. Albert left GE in 2004 as Chief Scientist of GE Cardiology to disrupt several new markets.

His latest invention, AliveCor’s KardiaMobile personal ECG technology, became a global sensation via a YouTube Video in January 2011 around the Consumer Electronics Show and was featured on ABC, CBS, CNN, and Fox News among many other media outlets. Dr. Albert has 32 issued US patents, a large number pending, and several new “secret inventions” in development. He has authored or co-authored over 50 scientific abstracts and publications, principally in the cardiology literature. Dr. Albert has lectured at the Entrepreneurship programs at the MIT Sloan School and the University of Oklahoma. Dr. Albert graduated with Honors from Harvard College and from Duke University Medical School.

About the Episode:

For this episode of Entrepreneur Rx, John is delighted to interview Dr. David Albert, a serial entrepreneur, inventor, and MD, that has founded three successful companies: InnovAlarm, Lifetone Technology, and AliveCor, and has worked in several startups.

David shares how he started down the inventor path while still at college, what his experience has been like in the world of health entrepreneurship, and offers advice for upcoming medical inventors, innovators, and entrepreneurs. David shares how he’s taking inventions all the way to market, how building a consumer brand is important without risking the medical validity of the product, and gives advice for people that have reached out to him saying they want to do the same as he did when he was young.

Entrepreneur Rx Episode 52:

Entrepreneur RX_David Albert: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

Entrepreneur RX_David Albert: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

John Shufeldt:
Hello everybody, and welcome to another edition of Entrepreneur Rx, where we help healthcare professionals own their future.

John Shufeldt:
Hey everybody, and welcome back to Entrepreneur Rx. I'm really excited to have Dr. David Albert hanging out with me. David is an Oklahoma native, he's a physician, inventor, and a serial entrepreneur that, he's been producing technologies and products for more than 30 years. He's a founder of three technology companies that we're going to chat about today. David, it's really exciting to have you on this podcast. Thank you.

David Albert:
Well, thank you, John, for inviting me. I look forward to it.

John Shufeldt:
Excellent. So, okay, give, so you have a really, you and I were talking before about an inventor that you've met, I've never met him, the gentleman who invented the portable ... machine that had an infusion pump guy named Dave .... Tell us how you got started on your, on your path. You were an undergrad, so you went to Harvard undergrad, then went to medical school. When did you?

David Albert:
So, I'm old, but I don't mind saying it. I graduated from college in 1977, a very, I'm a minor alumni in a class that includes Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer and Jim Cramer, we're all class of 77 at Harvard. And I went, headed South because on May 8th of my senior year, it snowed four inches in Cambridge. And I decided that I'm heading South where it's a little warmer and headed to Duke. And I was three-quarters of the way through medical school at Duke, and in 1980 my dad had a heart attack back in Oklahoma and I went back to see him. And when, he got out of the hut, he lived to be 91, by the way, he lived another 20 years. But when he got out, they said he lived in rural Oklahoma and he's very well educated, actually was a Rhodes scholar, was the speaker of the House, you know what Nancy Pelosi is? Well, my dad was named Carl Albert, he was the speaker of the House from 1970 to 76. And so super intelligent guy said, Mr. Albert, we want you to start walking, cardiac rehab. But he lived literally 200 miles from a cardiac rehab center, so, out in the country. And so I said, well, we want you to walk until your heart rate's 120. The problem was I knew my dad, he couldn't take his pulse, that's ridiculous. And this is pre-polar chest strap, pre-smartwatch, there was nothing ..., there were no heart rate monitors. And so I went back to Duke to finish my last eight months of medical school, that's all I had left. And, you know, to go through the match, which was a more informal process at the time, and I thought, I need to get something to help my dad monitor his heart rate while he's walking. So one of my classmates at Duke had been an undergraduate biomedical engineer at Duke, and he introduced me to one of his classmates, again, a class of 77 at Duke, who was in the graduate school in biomedical engineering getting his PhD. And I gave this guy $200 dollars, and $200 meant I eat ramen noodles for six months, that was a lot of money to me in 1980 to build me a heart rate monitor. And about two months later, he comes to me with a board with all these wires and things on it and says, it doesn't work, but I'm not going to do any more on it. And I was like, what, do I get my money back? What? I was so upset that I said, I'm never again going to be taken advantage of. So I went to the dean of the medical school, the dean of the engineering school, and said, I want to take a leave of absence from medical school and become an engineer. So I did. Next, two and a half years, I took undergraduate graduate classes at Duke in engineering, fluid mechanics, electronics, circuit design, programming, etc. And then I finished medical school and in the meantime I built two inventions, and I licensed one. And so, as I was going into my internship year, my friends are eating ramen noodles and I'm driving a Corvette I bought for myself. And I said, this inventing thing is pretty good, but I go back to Oklahoma to finish my training to the University of Oklahoma, where I'd done some research, and I get there and by the way, I'm married and have a baby. My wife was finishing Duke Medical School. We had a baby, she had the first baby in her medical school class. And today, we have four kids and two grandkids. But I go back and I come up with another idea, and nobody wants to license it. And I'd already licensed two inventions and I thought this was my best invention ever, was an EKG microscope. So I go to the chief of cardiology, who is my mentor and my mentor at Duke was a world-famous cardiologist. And I go to my wife and my dad and I say, I'm going to quit my training and start a company. I knew nothing about starting a company, I knew nothing about business. And of course, my wife with a baby, soon another one coming, and my dad thought, this doesn't sound like a very good idea to us, but my two mentors convinced my wife and my, my dad that let Dave do this, he can always go back practice medicine, you know. I was going to be an academic cardiologist, just go back and do that, don't worry about it. And so that was 35 years ago, never looked back. Four companies later, my first company I sold in 1991, and that was a company I started, built it up to $2 million dollars. And after that, I started the next company, which I sold, it went public in 1999, sold to GE in 2001, a company called Data Critical. And for three and a half years, I was the chief scientist of GE cardiology, although I'd never worked for a company that I hadn't started. And so after, in 2004, I realized this is not what I want to do. And so I left GE on very good terms, I know very good terms because you may know today they let our series F funding and one of their senior executives joined our board. As of this morning, we announced that, to they're a major investor and partner. And, you know, I began the odyssey and ultimately in 2010 started AliveCor. And you know, I'm glad to say that two and a half million customers later, almost 200 peer-reviewed publications, 50 odd patents, and 170 million ECG recordings, we've helped people, and we really ushered in this whole thing of digital medicine and digital health. I think everybody would say we were a pioneer. And so, you know, we turned it a real company, I won't say exactly, but we have tens of millions of dollars of revenue and have, and we compete against little tiny companies, fruit companies in Cupertino, search companies in Mountain View, South Korea's largest company, these are competitors, and we continue to grow vigorously and to have people like Omron, the world's leading blood pressure maker, Qualcomm, the world's leading mobile computing maker, and GE Healthcare as investors and partners. So I'm just, this the old saying, I'm just an old country inventor, John, and I've just been fortunate to be able to find the right people to help me turn those inventions into products and into companies. And, and I feel very blessed.

John Shufeldt:
Wow. That is a hell of a story. Well, I was looking on your board. You have Kholsa on your board as well. I mean.

David Albert:
He's our chairman, Vinod Kholsa's our chairman. We have a very powerful board. We have other, other people, we have the CEO of Omron, Health Care US, we have Dr. Sebastian Thrun, who's of world famous AI, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon professor, one of the gurus of AI. We have a powerful board, and we're being joined by Tom Westrick, who's the CEO of GE Life Care Solutions, and it's myself, our CEO, Priya Abani. It's a good board, and we try to keep their faith by continuing to grow and prosper.

John Shufeldt:
Innovate and build. So, okay, so going back, it takes a lot of, you know, really. So you had maybe unwittingly, but you had the kind of the burn the ship phenomenon when you went to your wife and father and said, I'm going to be an inventor because you had you know, you had the golden goose.

David Albert:
That was the dumbest idea. That was maybe one of my dumbest decisions ever in the history of man. I don't know exactly why I did that, and at least I've been able to communicate that. For instance, my son is now, is a board-certified internist, but left a faculty position at Cedars-Sinai to become a chief medical officer of a startup company. And, and today, he's one of the leading lights in obesity medicine in the world. And, and I told him, finish your training so that you've got a plan B. I had no plan B, I burned the bridges, there was no going home. And that was although, although my mentors as a doctor, Galen Wagner and Dr. Al Jazeera, they, they by the way, they're both dead. So I know I'm old because my mentors are all dead. My mentors convinced my parents and my wife that he has a plan B, I just never had to use it. And John, I have a lot of people coming to me, I have a lot of medical students, residents, fellows, and faculty members who say, I want to do what you did. And I look at them and go, no, you don't want to do. Because in 1987, being a physician entrepreneur was not like it is today, was not an accepted thing, leaving the clinical medicine track to do something like this, especially when you didn't have an MBA and you don't know the first thing about businessm was clearly out of the ordinary, and I think I was, I've just been lucky and blessed to have the support of my family and my friends, my mentors. I still am a big collaborator at the University of Oklahoma Medical Center. Got an abstract will be presenting at the American Heart Association in November. I've got over 100 publications, I'll probably am on seven or eight peer-reviewed papers so far in 2022, with likes of, you've heard of these people, Mayo Clinic, Inter mountain, so I'm blessed that I get to do what I want to do. I'm not interested in HR, I'm not that interested in marketing, certainly not interested in finance. And so you need to find people, today, inventing is very seldom a solo practice, and being an entrepreneur is absolutely not a solo practice.

John Shufeldt:
Right.

David Albert:
Those companies are made up of many, many different functions. And I think I'm old enough and wise enough to know what I'm good at and what I'm not good at.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, that's, incredibly well said. I just finished a book called The Originals by Adam Grant and I, I have thought, just and so, I've continued to practice emergency medicine and I've built this a bunch of companies, but I always had a fallback plan and I always thought, well, the people with a real guts do what you did, because it turns out in this book The Originals.

David Albert:
We're no brains. Really, God, no real guts or no brains. It could be interchangeable.

John Shufeldt:
You know, it's like between, you know, the old saying, it's like the comparison of the chicken and the pig and a ham and egg breakfast, you know, the chicken interests and the hams committed. I was, and you were the ham. So in his book, The Originals, he talks about the success rate of people who have this income along the way and truly hedge their bets, the chickens versus the ham. It turns out the chickens have a higher success rate, and what his theory is, is that they had to take less big bets, that they could be more studied along the way as opposed to burn the ship folks who were just all in. So, I mean, that's really a testament to the people who are, I interviewed a woman a couple week ago who was seven years in neurosurgery, did the fellowship, did the residency, the fellowship in the press for seven years, and did a start up. I'm like, oh my god, that takes a lot of guts, you basically forfeit your income, just like, no, it just seemed like the right thing to do, and that was six years ago. So again, hats off to you, that's pretty damn cool.

David Albert:
Well, I guess I'm very fortunate it's worked out for me. Today, there are many more physicians doing entrepreneurial things. There's the Society for Physician Entrepreneurs. I mean, SOPE ... contacted me ten years ago about that when he was first starting that organization. And all I can say is most of them are like, you, have a plan B, have a backup, have a side gig and practicing medicine. You know, my wife is a faculty member in rheumatology at USC, so I've seen it, and I'm involved in clinical research literally all over the world. Yesterday, talking to Maastricht in the Netherlands and I'll be in Barcelona and Helsinki, Finland in, at the end of this month. So the difference is, I think it just worked out, it didn't have to. And I tell people that, I tell young trainees and medical students, you have a plan B, you have your plan B, and then and that will also allow you to have a better view of the problems that need solving. And that's what physicians, that's the unique situation that physicians have. You're an emergency physician. You can see all kinds of problems that exist in either the practice of medicine or the administration that all the other aspects of it. And therefore, that's a unique position, a unique perspective. And I think I've just gotten to, you know, I love, still love interacting with patients. I'll be at a major hospital this Thursday, interacting with doctors and patients as they spin up a brand new system. But what I'm really good at is, I just had got my 80th patent, is that I'm an inventor and, and I can take those insights and come up with solutions. But then I need a lot of other people to help me bring those to market.

John Shufeldt:
Well, like you said, it's not a solo sport. So, so talk about, talk about AliveCor and KardiaMobile and what was the problem you were solving and how have you solved it?

David Albert:
Well, and that's another story in and of itself. In 1995 with my company, I sold to EG, I came up with this idea that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. And what if we could cut out all the middlemen and have a patient be able to directly communicate their critical information, their cardiac rhythm, to a physician? And so I put together something that was called Rhythm Stat Excel, actually got a patent, actually got a 510K, but it was a Rube Goldberg, because at the time we had this Palm computer, we had this Motorola cell phone, we had this PCMCIA card and a cable, it was an absolute Rube Goldberg thing, so it never was commercialized, but it was the concept. So then came 2007, introduction of today's smartphone, and ultimately over the next two or three years, the concept of cardio mobile that you have a personal ECG device, even just recording a single lead that we could deliver valuable information, engage a patient in their own care, very important if you want compliant good outcome patients and deliver that information in an extremely timely manner to people who might use it to save a life. And so that was the concept. And it ultimately, the technology caught up to my idea to become practical. And today, that concept, it's continued to evolve over the last ten years. And today, it's evolved to the point where we have our cardio mobile card, which is literally the size of a credit card, that is a single ECDG device that will do thousands of ECGs, last several years, yet fits in your wallet, just like with your other credit cards.

John Shufeldt:
And you just put one finger on each side.

David Albert:
One finger on each side. You got lead one, left arm on this right arm. We've got 100, over 180 peer-reviewed publications, AliveCor. So something I take a lot of pride in is we've led with clinical validation. And again, those come from places you've never heard of, like Cleveland Clinic and Mass General and Columbia and Mayo Clinic. So literally, I came at Digital Health from the perspective of a physician who had been involved in healthcare inventing for 20 years. And many digital health companies are started by engineers and software programmers and people like that. And so I believed in clinical validation first, not press releases, and that served us well, such that we have extremely large companies as our competitor, yet we're able to continue to grow and flourish. And that to me, is just an example, the fact that we have this great warehouse of clinical validation, we're accepted as a medical tool, not a toy.

John Shufeldt:
So, so someone buys a card, they pay a monthly subscription for it?

David Albert:
No, they don't have to, just buy the card, $99. I think it's $99. You have to go to Amazon to find out, you buy the card, there are some advanced services you can buy a subscription, which will give you four cardiologists over reads a year, it'll give you a bunch of other features, that's about $10 a month to do that. But you don't have to. You can just buy it, generate a PDF and email it to your doctor if you want, and note, for no additional fee. So that perspective, and we have other products, we have a device that gives you half the 12 EDCG, all six limb leads, sort of KardiaMobile XL. And then we have our original KardiaMobile, I was just in CVS and saw one in the, in the shelf with the blood pressure cuffs, $79, it's an incredible value. And that device, you know what I was really happy about? Is they buy them in threes, which means they've sold two in that one store and they just have one left. So and we pioneered, I think, for digital health, the use of building a brand with TV ads. So people have seen our ad on CNN and FOX and NFL football, and so we've built a consumer brand, yet we're a medical device. So we're not a consumer device, we're a medical device sold directly to consumers. And something I've always said, John, is not every consumer is a patient, but every patient is a consumer. And therefore, customer-first focus is always been in AliveCor's mantra, and, and I think it's again served us well. At the same time, you have clinical validation, customer obsession. We kind of bring those two things together with our technology, our software and our services.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah. I mean, I can't tell you how many times people have come into the emergency department say my heart's skipping beats, it went really fast for a period of time, I almost passed out, having a, having a single lead to say, well, you're in AFib while you're in SVT or while you're in VTEC or sinus, sinus ... is incredibly helpful because without it you're just flipping a coin and then they put, you know, you have to put a whole thermometer on them, which takes quite a while to do so. I mean, this is truly life-saving, it's.

David Albert:
Well, in England. The NHS now has adopted an accepted Kardia and there is an ER doctor named Matthew Reid who's now published four papers. He says every time anybody comes in with, with palpitations, we give them a Kardia and send them home. And he's shown that it has a much higher diagnostic yield than a 24-hour Holter, because those palpitations may not come back for three or four weeks. And so even as ... Patch or something, he said, this enables us to do a more rapid diagnosis and to have a higher diagnostic yield. And so he's published a bunch of papers and trying to get that accepted. In England, it's easy, it's one system. In the United States, it's thousands of, there's no system, it's thousands of systems. So it's a little, a little more challenging. But, but it's still, it's, you're, the application you bring up is being done today in the United Kingdom.

John Shufeldt:
How is Apple doing it with this? With their wristwatch and which is really only a single, I mean, it's just a single point on your wrist and they're still ....

David Albert:
... They do it, you know, you touch it with your other one. So they do, again, a lead on ECG with, with their device. And so as does Fitbit and Samsung, they all, I would say that they all came out with the same type of, of device added on to their smartwatch platforms, and I do not talk ill of my competitors.

John Shufeldt:
No, of course not.

David Albert:
I speak with my performance. And so all I would say is they've got solutions and they have millions of customers for those solutions, and I hope they help take care of them. We have a unique situation in, a unique demographic, John, our, that's the difference. Those are consumer products that have a medical capability. Ours is a medical product, and how do I know that? Because our average age is over the age of 60. Our biggest decade is 60 to 70 and the second biggest decade, 70 to 80. Those aren't people that buy smartwatches, that's a completely different demographic. And so ours is a dedicated device giving you a dedicated function. And so that, it's a different market. There's certainly overlap, but a different market.

John Shufeldt:
Did you ever think, looking back, you know that old saying, life's got to be live forwards, but it only makes sense looking backwards? Did you ever think 20 years ago, 15, 30 years ago, you'd be showing me a credit card and saying, this is how you do a single EDKG? I mean, it's got to be just mind-blowing to you.

David Albert:
Well, I mean, my whole journey, I consider it a random walk. It's not, hindsight's 20-20 or so, my ophthalmologist tells me. And, oh, by the way, I have 20-20 vision for the first time since I was ten years old. Thank you cataract extractions, lens implants, okay? And those are my readers, that's why I had them, because they're my readers. But I don't have to wear glasses anymore for driving and surfing because I live on the beach. So it's pretty nice, pretty nice gig. I would just tell you that I go forward, I'm proud of the things I've done, I've tried to second guess myself. Should I have done this? Should I have done that? Would it have had a better outcome? A different outcome? And all I can tell you is best thing I ever did was marrying my wife, she's fabulous. And I'm not, there's no second guessing there. And the other things, not much value in doing that. So from my perspective, it's kind of like burn the bridges, there was a, it was an old movie, it's old because I know Burt Reynolds was in it's Cannonball. Cannonball Express.

John Shufeldt:
I know it.

David Albert:
And in Cannonball Express, the guy, the Italian guy driving the Ferrari first thing, first rule of Italian driving, he rips the mirrors off, don't look backwards. And I kind of have to adopt that first rule of Italian driving, you only live forward.

John Shufeldt:
But however, you learned things in your previous two companies that you, that you apply to AliveCor.

David Albert:
Well, I have an entrepreneurial prayer that I came up with.

John Shufeldt:
I want to hear it.

David Albert:
God, grant me the wisdom to only make new mistakes.

John Shufeldt:
I love it, yup, okay.

David Albert:
That is. Yes, you're absolutely right. Those who do not learn history are bound to repeat it. We have a lot of those people in this world, but I'm glad to say I'm not one of them. And so I absolutely try not to make the same mistakes.

John Shufeldt:
So let me ask another question. So I always joke that I'm probably unemployable, I've just worked for myself lying so long that I'm generally consider myself unemployable. But you not only worked for yourself, then you went to one of the largest companies in the world, maybe the largest at the time.

David Albert:
At the time it was the largest. Yeah.

John Shufeldt:
... That was post-Jack Welch, right?

David Albert:
Right. That was, actually it was, we were one of Jeff Immelt's first acquisitions. They bought my company on 9/11, 2001. It was wild, it was just wild. We're watching the TVs and planes are crashing, my wife's crying, calling me, I was in Seattle, my family's in Oklahoma City, it was just crazy. So, yeah. And after three and a half years, I realized it was not the right place for me. But, but I will tell you one thing. This is, and it's consistent with what we were talking about my first year at GE, that you have this 360, where you have all your peers and your boss, and everybody reviews you, and I had a terrible review. I didn't know what I was doing, you're just not productive, you know? You probably should leave. And I got good grades, okay? Nobody ever said that to me, and it really motivated me. I was about to say pissed me off, but it motivated me. And so after that, when I left, I reported to the chief technology officer of GE Health Care, I report it to Joe Hogan, who at the time was the head of GE Health Care and later went on to run ABB and, and they begged me to stay because I realized that I was a square peg in a round hole. But I figured out how I could shrink my square down to where it fits in the round hole, okay? I could make it work. I could understand how they thought and what their system was like, and I could win at it. And I did, I absolutely did. And, and so, but that was in and of myself, I kind of said, this is not me. I just made me fit here. And so I adapted to the environment, but at the same time, I wasn't doing any inventing, I can tell you that. I was, I had ideas, but I wasn't doing inventing it more than anything else ... Probably a salesman out selling MRs and CTs and cath labs and echos to hospital systems as the expert. So, I learned, I learned that I can do that, I could adapt, I'm probably unemployable also, but if I had to, I'd do it. The good news is today I don't have to anymore. So they're more likely to have to make their square, round out their square peg, round the square hole so that my round peg will fit in it, so.

John Shufeldt:
Well, yeah, well, gee, today is not, you know, I read the book from The Gut and it was kind of marvel that Jack Welch's philosophy on, on managing employees and the 360 surveys and the whole nine yards. I thought, wow, that's a cool process. Living in it would be interesting, but you know, obviously GE has had tremendous challenges over the last 15 years.

David Albert:
Well, the good news, it didn't really affect the health care group very much, but there were a lot of mistakes made. I'm not going to point fingers at, a lot of other people pointing the fingers at whoever you know, whether it's Jeff Immelt or Jack Welch, it was a system that had a lot of problems. And I could see that even in 2004. And so, you know, at the time it wasn't a thing for me. But, you know, I have tremendous respect for GE. We just partnered with them, and I have great friends there. They're the leader in many aspects of health care. And I think, you know, we're excited about the opportunities because AliveCor has had this patient-consumer focus, and this partnership brings us into the health care enterprise, and as much as I hate to tell people in digital health, we're not going to have telestents and tele-surgeries anytime soon. You're not going to be putting in your ... in your kitchen. So there's still critical need for hospital specialist, technology-oriented care. And we're glad we're going to be partnering with a company as great as GE to, to bring our technology and solutions to that environment.

John Shufeldt:
That's amazing. So you said you're on your series F funding, series F's getting kind of long in the tooth. What's the exit?

David Albert:
Well, you know, it's, you can't cover the macro environment. You know, the world has changed radically in a year. A year ago, a new health care, digital health unicorn was being born every week, unbelievable valuations, Spacs, you know, were prevalent and popular and everybody doing it, we turned several down, I think wisely. Again, we have smart people like Vinod Khosla and the window for IPOs has gone closed. Spacs are going to go away. Most of those have done incredibly poorly.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah.

David Albert:
So Wall Street has had a major correction and no more has that been obvious than in high-growth companies, i.e. people not making money. AliveCor, we spend more money than we make. We make good money, but we spend a lot more because we're trying to push our growth. And that, that's the group that has been especially hurt in the last year or so. You know, we don't control the environment, but we want to continue to grow, and we want to continue to expand our business into places like the health care enterprise. And so private funding, I'm just glad we could do it. It's a tough environment out there for people raising money. It's not like it was, and there's an incredible amount of venture capital, dry powder, you know, family offices, private equity. However, they're extremely reluctant to invest right now because their crystal balls are in the shop and they're, they're a little cloudy. And so I think everybody, you know, we feel very good about what we've, about the funding we've raised and that, you know, it'll last us quite a while given our growth rate and our, our revenue. So we've got good margins, we've got all those things, again, we've got some things we want to do before we, before we stop, let's put it that way.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, I like it. You know, you probably know the same and I have a feeling you have an idea, and we'll have an instant idea. But you know, there's sayings attributed to Isaac Newton, .... his, if I have seen further than others, as long as I'm standing on the shoulders of giants, who shoulders are you standing on?

David Albert:
Oh, we're standing on many people's shoulders. I mean, I personally am standing on the shoulders of my wife and my mentors, those who've helped us, certainly on our investors, our board members.

John Shufeldt:
But how about scientists? How about like inventors before you?

David Albert:
I mean, you mentioned Dean Kamen. Yeah. Dean's a little older than I am, but not that much. He's an independent inventor. But like Thomas Edison, he has a whole team of people behind you, okay? It's not just Dean Kamen in a garage. And, and you look at, you look at the other, others who have, who are of similar ilk. There's Tom Foley, the Foley catheter. He's been a, a major innovative force in Silicon Valley MedTech. A lot of people, a guy named Mike Ramsey. Mike Ramsey was an MD PhD, biomedical engineering Duke, started a company called CreditCon. So if you ever had the .... Blood pressure cuff, Mike Ramsey developed that as a student at Duke. Bill Nye started the ... And Bill ... And that major company, Joe Kiani here at Masimo, down in Southern California, took the business away from AlCor and has, has revolutionized the non-invasive monitoring of blood gases, be it O2 sat or boxing .... Whatever. These are, these are inventors who I respect a lot. Companies like Edwards, you know, whether it's from the Swan Gans catheter to the ..., they've, they've continued to innovate and, and bring really important inventions to health care. So those are the kind of people I emulate and that I study. And I, you know, there are some in the ECG area, there's a guy very much alive, Dr. David Mortara, was the first VP of engineering Marquette Electronics, then started Mortara Instruments that sold to Welch Alan, that sold to Hill Ram, that sold to Baxter. And David is a brilliant PhD physicist who is now working at UCSF on a voluntary basis, but still doing great stuff, a super innovator, brilliant man. These are the kinds of people, you know, who I respect and in my own little way try to emulate.

John Shufeldt:
Well, that's great, great answer. Well, David, this would have been fascinating. I mean, like probably a lot of people listening to say, I want to be you when I grow up. So congratulations on that.

David Albert:
Thank you.

John Shufeldt:
Where can people find out more about you?

David Albert:
Well, you know, they should follow me on Twitter. I'm @DrDave01 D R D A V E 01, by post ECG rhythm strips, and I'm lucky enough to have some of the world's top cardiologists talk about them all the time. And on LinkedIn, same thing, at D R D A V E 01, DrDave01. And you know, AliveCor.com is our website. You can, there's a little blurb there and I'm actually easy to reach. You can reach out to me on LinkedIn or, or Twitter and I'm happy to talk to people. And I really enjoy talking to young people and at least giving them some benefit of my experience. Like my children, we have four kids that are all grown. My youngest is 23 and he's over here, college graduate, the last of four, by the way, last, that's a good milestone. Last ... they're going to do their own thing, and they're going to find their own way and they're going to find their own, follow their own passion. And that's, that's what I encourage everyone to do. So the young people come to me saying, I want to do what you did. I go, N¡no, you want to do it the way you want to do it, not the way I did it. So that's, that's what I try to do. So thank you, John. Thank you for this opportunity.

John Shufeldt:
Pleasure. You totally killed it. Folks, sign him off. Have a great time. We'll see you again in a week or so. Thanks then, Dr. Albert. Thank you very much. This has been more than inspiring.

David Albert:
Doctor, thank you.

John Shufeldt:
Thanks for listening to another great edition of Entrepreneur Rx. To find out how to start a business and help secure your future, go to JohnShufeldtMD.com. Thanks for listening.

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Key Take-Aways:

  • For physicians that want to go into entrepreneurship: finish your training and burn no bridges
  • Physicians going into startups must have a plan B, which usually is their medical practice.
  • What it means to be a physician entrepreneur has changed through the years.
  • Being an entrepreneur is not a solo practice, and neither is inventing.
  • Great inventors need people that can bring their patents to market.
  • It’s necessary to build a consumer brand while not risking its medical validity.

Resources: