Mike Monovoukas is the co-founder and CEO of AcuityMD, a platform that helps medical device manufacturers accelerate commercial adoption. Before founding AcuityMD, Mike started his career as a management consultant, then co-founded a medical device startup with his brother, where he first experienced firsthand how much time and effort it took just to prepare for a single sales call. That experience became the foundation for AcuityMD.

In this conversation with Shannon Lantzy, Mike walks through how AcuityMD combines publicly available market data with internal commercial data to surface highly personalized opportunities for medical device sales teams. He shares the customer story that defined the company's mission, why the physics of a business model matter as much as the mission statement, and what he believes regulators can do to unlock innovation. He also reflects on building culture at scale, why he hires missionaries not mercenaries, and the spidey sense every founder needs to keep.

Timestamps:

[00:00:00] Introduction and AcuityMD overview

[00:01:00] Competitive swimming, discipline, and early mornings

[00:02:04] From athlete to founder: the origin story

[00:03:36] First medical device startup with his brother

[00:05:08] The research problem that became AcuityMD

[00:06:28] The aha moment: combining market data with internal data

[00:08:28] What customers measure AcuityMD on

[00:09:16] Paul Graham, COVID, and the things that did not scale

[00:14:28] Walking through the Synchron use case

[00:17:24] What pre-commercial use looks like in practice

[00:19:12] Switching between business language and medtech language

[00:20:04] Hiring missionaries not mercenaries

[00:21:04] Why the physics of the business model matter

[00:22:28] The problem with business models that restrict care

[00:23:52] Prior auth, AI, and creating bottlenecks

[00:25:32] Using FDA's MAUDE database for competitive intelligence

[00:27:24] How sales data can feed back into product development

[00:30:52] Most gratifying customer story: the rural hospital

[00:35:40] Open payments, over-prescription, and the hard questions

[00:38:52] AcuityMD's mission: making healthcare abundant

[00:42:32] Pre-reimbursement use cases

[00:43:44] What is hardest right now: scaling culture

[00:45:08] Culture is how people make decisions when you are not in the room

[00:46:24] Rapid fire questions

Follow Shannon and Mike:

Connect with Shannon: 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shannonlantzy/

Website: https://www.shannonlantzy.com/

Connect with Mike: 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-monovoukas-0786a52b/

Website: https://www.acuitymd.com/