Why MedTech is the Future of Entrepreneurship with Omar Khateeb | Ep. 54

Do you think the state of MedTech in cybersecurity is improving at all, or are we getting worse? I think it's improving. What do you think, Trevor, about the industry and cybersecurity? I would hope that it's a little bit more well-structured than some of these other situations which we've seen come up in similar cases in the past. There's got to be—and again, these are part of larger macroeconomic issues, I don't have an answer—but I'll give you an example on the capital side. Welcome back to another episode of The Med Device Cyber Podcast. Today we have a guest, Omar. He's going to talk to us about the state of MedTech, and he's been doing quite a few podcasts. I don't know what episode number you're on, but you've interviewed and talked to a lot of people in the industry, haven't you, Omar? Yes, definitely, definitely. I mean, you guys have been on the show before when we did a webinar together, and we have your episode coming out soon. But yeah, I think we're 330. It's in the 300s right now. All right, so you've got a pretty good pulse after 300-something discussions with people in MedTech. So it'll be interesting to see how you feel the industry has shifted over the years, and we'll talk a little bit about cybersecurity as well, because I know we talked about that in the past. I'm Christian Espinosa, the co-host, and I'm here joining with Trevor, our co-host. And I think you two are coming to us from NorCal and SoCal, is that right? That's right. I'm in SoCal. I didn't know Trevor was in NorCal now. I thought Charles was like the international man of mystery. He's always like somewhere in the world. Yeah, I'm settling down for a few more hours here, actually, even in San Francisco, and then back on the road again. I do have an apartment here that is now becoming an expensive storage unit, but yeah, very small. That is probably the world's most expensive storage unit for sure. I would change that quickly, or just move to the East Bay. I don't know. Yeah, I think it's hard to beat the San Francisco just closeness of everything, but yeah, I figure I've got to spend a little bit more time here to actually enjoy the closeness of everything. Awesome. Why don't we start off, Omar, with you introducing yourself and giving a little bit of background about what you do and what your organization does? And we can go from there. Yeah, wonderful, and again, thanks for having me on the show. It's an honor to be on. You have a fantastic show and, more importantly, I love podcasts that have a very specific niche. You guys have a very nice focus on technology and cybersecurity. So what do I do? I've been in the industry a little over 15 years, started off in medical school before I transitioned into surgical robotics as a sales guy, moved into marketing, and, as they say, the rest is history. A few years ago, I decided to start my own business. It started off with me selling online courses because I just didn't want to deal with anybody. I literally wanted to make WiFi money and just sell a product and not deal with anybody. But then over time, I was like, yeah, you know, I'm actually really good at marketing and market engineering. And so I started my own firm. So our company, Marketcraft, our whole focus is on essentially the whole idea behind market engineering. A lot of people know about what it takes or what it looks like to create a category, but in order for that to actually work, you have to be able to engineer a market, or in our case, craft a market. So you can drive adoption, raise awareness with investors, and even leverage strategics for a buyout. And so we work with a lot of early-stage companies, anywhere from pre-FDA, pre-commercial, all the way through commercial. We don't necessarily work with strategics, but in our product roadmap, I think for every small business, especially if you're service-oriented, at some point, you're going to end up working with large strategics in the future. What people know me for, they don't really know me for Marketcraft, what they know me for, which is going to change; we just went through a name change. Now we're Marketcraft, away from Kativ and Co, so there will be a lot of really great thought leadership content produced on that end so that people know what we do and, more importantly, how they can spend money with us. But what everybody knows me for is really 'State of MedTech,' the podcast. With that show, I interview investors, CEOs, and industry experts like yourselves, and really just to have a pulse on the industry. And so as a result of that, I guess I'm one of the few people in the space who really has a true pulse on things because I'm talking to so many different people, from investors and CEOs down to even salespeople. Awesome. So what is the pulse on MedTech? Are we getting better, getting worse? What is the pulse? What would you say? It's kind of a hard question to answer, though, right? No, not a hard question! As the host of a show called 'The State of MedTech,' I should be able to articulate what the state of MedTech is. So if you kind of look at it, if the last few years were about consolidation in an industry, very few strategics. If you look at the strategics in our industry, you have seven of them, and I'm going to list them out. The seven strategics were essentially Abbott, Edwards, Boston Scientific, Stryker, Siemens, J&J MedTech, and Intuitive. Of course, I can't forget Intuitive. And so, the state of the industry for the longest time was essentially that these companies could kind of sit back and see how things go in the market. They didn't really have to have this really aggressive M&A approach. Boston, I think, is probably the most active buyer, and they do a really good job of that. But the problem with that is that over the last few years, while a lot of consolidation was happening, there wasn't a lot of competition in the market, and so exits were depressed. As a result of that, venture capital became a lot more strained. Venture as a whole, across all industries, not just MedTech, was a really poor-performing asset over the last few years. And so for LPs, they put a lot of pressure on their VCs. And now VCs these days, whether you're in MedTech or tech or anything else, are really looking at revenue-generating companies, which is great. I mean, you can essentially hire a monkey to look at a company making money and say,