Episode description

Steve Goetz is now the Chief Technology Officer at Motif Neurotech which is developing a minimally invasive neural implant for the treatment of depression and mental health issues. Steve was at Medtronic for 26 years before moving over to the startup landscape.

Top 3 Takeaways:

•  "Starting a big program that you don't know how to finish is a very expensive endeavor, and so you want to really shake out all the science risk, all the technology risk,  be pretty sure you can execute a thing before you turn on that big engine because it's expensive once you go"

• "We know stimulation of the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex is very efficacious in treatment-resistant depression.  Our question is, can we develop a cranial stimulator that can do that in the comfort of a patient's home on demand and with a dosing profile that is matched to that patient's acuity and severity that both treats depression and at some point in the future turns into a maintenance therapy that prevents relapse altogether. And what that looks like to us is a pea-sized stimulator that fits in a minimally invasive burr hole that sits on top of the dura, so not brain penetrating,  that delivers this therapy powered externally from a wearable, like a hat or a headband."

• "For deep brain stimulation, there's a subspecialty of neurosurgery called functional stereotactic neurosurgery with on the order of hundreds of surgeons in the US. There are more that have the specialization to make a burr hole. You go from a few 100 to several 1000 people in the US who can do a burr hole. Over 200,000 burr holes are made in a given year in the US"

1:00 Do you want to introduce yourself better than I just did?

3:00 What was that smaller group within Medtronic?

8:30 What does the organizational structure look like at a place like Medtronic?

11:30 What do those teams look like?

16:00 Is each team working on a project?

18:15 CEITEC Nano Ad Sponsorship

18:45 What is Motif all about?

24:15 What is the success rate of TMS and what do you hope to achieve?

25:15 This isn't brain surgery but it is close to it, what's involved in this?

29:15 Could this surgery be done by a lower-skilled person than a neurosurgeon?

31:00 How does insurance reimbursement look like for Motif?

36:15 Why is this technology possible now?

 41:30 Your technology seems bikini-ready

42:45 What is the progress of your company?

45:00 What's the small company vs large company life like?

47:30 How long do big decisions take in a big company?

48:45 How is the pace in a small vs small company?

51:00 What is the perfect recipe for working in a meaningful company vs learning in another company?

53:45 Anything else you wanted to mention?