Strategic Focus: Serial Entrepreneur - YouTube

My name is Mir and my training is in engineering and medicine.

Electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, material science

a little bit of computer science and Went to medical school for three and

a half years and ended up starting my first company right then.

So and I've started probably 28 companies in the last 35 years

or some of them have gone public.

Two failed and I still have nine private companies that are different stages.

…. while I was in college,

I really enjoyed solving tough, unsolved problems.

So I always gravitated towards problems that others either had given up on,

or had not been solved.

And so, that was my personal mission,

to really go after really big unsolved mysteries.

… my strengths were, of course in engineering,

both in electrical engineering and mechanical engineering.

But I also had gone to medical school for three years, so

I had some medical training.

So I felt very confident that I could solve the scientific and

technical problems, in my first venture,

where we were developing the first implantable defibrillator.

But of course I had, I was 24 years old so I had a lot of weaknesses,

that I didn't even realize were weaknesses, of course.

And ma, many of them were related to business, you know,

finance, business, accounting.

I didn't know what a, what a balance sheet and income statement were.

there were gaps in my knowledge that I had to fill quickly. 

…. when I was first starting out,

the, the concept of acceptance criteria was very fuzzy in my mind.

I really didn't have, any, any good or

well thought out acceptance criteria, at that young age.

But what was driving me were these big unsolved problems.

So the, problem I started work on with Dr. Murouski from

Johns Hopkins and others really focused on sudden cardiac death.

And we knew that there were half a million people dying of sudden

death just in the U.S. every year.

And so that was a big problem.

It was an unsolved problem.

These patients didn't have any solution, other than

hoping that someone would come to their rescue when they had their episode.

So doing the implantable defibrillator seemed like the right thing.

Now, of course, later on in later years, I have developed a much

more robust set of criteria to select the problems I work on. 

… I, try and stay away from small incremental innovations.

And so my focus in identifying problems is really around big problems

that are poorly treated, or poorly diagnosed or have nasty side effects.

…when you are going after disruptive innovations that redefine the problem, and

creates new solution from that re-definition of problem,

you're generally in a, a less crowded intellectual property space.

And, and the bigger the, the improvement in outcomes, FDA actually works with

you because they want to see dramatic improvements in patient outcomes.

The payers are more willing to to cover your new innovations.

So, there are a number of advantages or benefits that accrue from going after,

these poorly solved problems that impact a lot of people.

… choose problems that are worthy of solutions. 

you really want to hitch yourself to problems that are really significant.

And that's what will create your career.