Failure - the Podcast

We’d thought we’d learned from a prior guest to this august podcast that Big Pharma could provide cures for more diseases, if only flaws in America’s third-party payor health care system could be fixed.  Today’s guest is not so sure of that.  Dr. Seth Powsner, a professor at Yale and a practicing ER physician, says that it’s really a question of will: the collective will of a nation to solve a problem.  That’s especially true when it comes to curing diabetes.  Sure, a cure might be around the corner, but more likely, it’ll take the will the people and the government to solve the obesity crisis.  And, by the time we belly up to that bar, it might be as well to simply start eating better.  That may prove a better cure than even Big Pharma can provide, with or without an adequate reimbursement mechanism.

Join the team from Failure - the Podcast (a/k/a Innovation Blab) as they stumble upon the dark underbelly of Big Pharma.  Our guest, Imran Nasrullah, has 25+ years of experience in the industry, specializing in drug licensing and business development.  He tell tales that few know or want to believe.  One in ten thousand, for example:  9,999 candidate drugs tested and rejected for one that makes it to the next stage-gate.  Few drugs make it through all the hurdles, but a surprising number that do are cures — not merely daily, weekly or monthly treatments.  Unfortunately, the most efficacious drugs aren’t necessarily the ones that either the makers want to make or insurers want to pay for.  Is there a better way?  Who knows.  Join Jeff, David and Mark wrestle with Imran Nasrullah’s picture of a dark aspect of the U.S. health care system which, like democracy, seems the worst there could be, except for all others that have been tried.

Who knew?

Join the Innovation Blab (a/k/a Failure - the Podcast) in a double-header. A two-fer. “Episode 80 - Broken Down Cars” and “Episode 81 - The Singularity is Nigh.” Our special guests are … well … special.

Milind Sawant is an AI guru, currently with Siemens Healthcare and leading a team of 50 engineers and a $15M budget to drive AI integration into medical systems.  It’s no surprise that Milind is a big fan of AI and the promise it brings to healthcare.  That shone through despite Jeff’s probing questions, Dave’s skepticism and Mark’s snoring.  (OK, we exaggerate:  Mark was no noisier catching Zs than a former president at a felony trial).

Who knew that podcasts could be so much better than watching a felon anoint a faux hillbilly as successor-in-chief before a cheering crowd in red?

Who knew?

Join Innovation Blab/Failure - the Podcast in a double-header.  A two-fer.  “Episode 80 - Broken Down Cars” and “Episode 81 - The Singularity is Nigh.”  Our special guests are … well … special.

Sydney Robinson is CEO and co-founder of Vessl Prosthetics, an Ontario-based startup that is hellbent on improving the lives of below-knee amputees and on proving that not all orthopedic startups end up like broken down cars along the road to success.  We think they’ve got a shot at both.  If Sydney can survive 45 minutes of our drivel, she should have no problem navigating the tough medical industry market.

Who knew that podcasts could be so much better than a presidential debate between octogenarians?

Catch them on a good day, and we suspect that many an entrepreneur would say that bootstrapping a business is like a bowl of cherries, pits and all.  Leaving aside the independently wealthy, that more traditional approach may destine the enterprise to slower, bounded growth.  A lifestyle business.  One that’s likely to yield more pits than flesh early on, but that with the right mix of hard work, pivots and luck can be fruitful in the long run.

Nasty, brutish and short might be what you hear of startup life from founders who took outside investment.  Not all of them.  Not all of the time.  But, we bet they skew more that way on the spectrum than do the lifestyle-istas.  What would you expect?  Take on an angel investor and there’s one more mouth to feed.  Take on venture capital and it can be a vicious, gaping one.

Join the Innovation Blab in a conversation with Thomas Collet, a serial entrepreneur who’s on his seventh startup.  Would Thomas describe his experiences as bowls of cherries or nasty, brutish and short?  Listen to today’s episode and you may find out.

Ask an entrepreneur: “what keeps you up at night?”  They’ve heard The Question before and have an answer at the ready.  But they’ll make you wait through a feigned moment of reflection before they launch into it.

Investors play the game, too.  Get a group of them together and, invariably, one of them will pose The Question whenever an entrepreneur does a pitch.  All present will nod knowingly as the collective’s secret weapon is unleashed.  The entrepreneur’s perfectly timed pause, then, answer (the latter, offered with the gravity of a Churchill wartime address) only add to the excitement.  Theatrics and reality merge, and all present will walk away convinced of the truth of the seemingly revelatory moment.

Join the Innovation Blab in a discussion with Jamie Magrill and Anna Frumkin of DECAP Research and Development, Inc., a Canadian startup that aims to change the way hospital and healthcare workers dispose of syringes.  Don’t worry, we don’t pose The Question to Jamie and Anna.  We do get close, however, and some may find the discussion that ensues amusing.  Have a listen …

Election fever.  With all the news, who can avoid it?  Not a news ticker scrolls by without a mention of Biden's age, Trump's trials and RFK's betrayals.   We're not immune to it.  So when a scheduled guest went AWOL, we figured we'd talk about the first thing that came to mind.  Suffice it to say that MAGA conservatives aren't the only ones who hang out in echo chambers.

Join us in a discussion with Diane Bouis, director of MedTech Innovator, the world’s largest life science startup accelerator program.

Not that we have a vested interest, but we’d suggest that Joe Biden make a go at it with a blue baseball cap sporting the acronym MIGA.  You know, “make innovation great again!”  Speaking of innovation, today’s guest is John Daniels, a tinkerer turned entrepreneur who is daring fate by joining the Innovation Blab in a discussion of his latest venture.  It’s developing a rapid diagnostic kit to test for Covid and whatever else ails mankind. With a bit of luck, he’ll launch the product before Kari Lake returns to Arizona politics following a two-year break.

Welcome to Innovation Blab, a new series of podcasts (…keep fingers crossed…) offering the B-side to Failure - the Podcast. Yes, Mark will be back, and we hope to put up both Innovation and Failure posts in the coming days (months, more likely), but as they say about the alleged clandestine romantic relationship surrounding appointment of the special prosecutor in the Georgia election interference cases, we shall see.

Can’t say that much has been made of the B-side of late.  Baby boomers are probably the last to have given it much thought, but in its heyday, the B-side was pretty much the tomalley of 45 RPM, 7-inch vinyl records.  (Don’t know tomalley?  Ask a lobster.)  Aficionados looked forward to it.  Everybody else, not so much.

The B-side could grow on you, though.  Take Elvis’s “Hound Dog,” the Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus,” the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”  The list goes on.  So does the beat.

To the armchair intellectual, the A-side and the B-side are like yin and yang.  There’s no need to drag Eastern philosophy into an LA marketing gimmick, though.  Two sides of the same coin is more like it.  The only philosophy here is KISS:  keep it simple stupid.

Speaking of innovation and failure (were we?), maybe they’re like yin and yang.  We asked ChatGPT, and we got a qualified “sort of.”  It felt a little like the prize every kid gets at soccer, win or lose.  Yes, the AI said, innovation and failure can be complementary forces, but no, they are not interconnected and interdependent opposites.  Just to check that, we asked the electric savant the same of Donald Trump and the news media.  We pretty much got the same answer.  Consistency doesn’t prove correctness, but it’s a start.

So what does any of that have to do with today’s podcast?  Have a listen and judge for yourself.  Our guest is Stefan Koehler, director of therapeutics licensing at the University of Michigan.  We didn’t ask him about yin and yang, nor about failure — though, he did give some insights into licensing that would make Jim Harbaugh proud.  (Sorry, Stefan, wrong department, but you catch our drift).