How Market Intelligence Shapes MedTech Growth with Kevin Saem | Ep. 46

In this episode of The Med Device Cyber Podcast, host Christian Espinosa is joined by Kevin Saem, the founder of Zaparus, a SaaS platform providing market intelligence specifically for the MedTech industry. The conversation centers on the intersection of market intelligence, sales strategy, and cybersecurity within medical technology. Kevin shares his journey from a research background with a PhD in translational chemistry—where he worked on portable diagnostics and tissue engineering—to the world of entrepreneurship. His experience as COO for a liquid biopsy startup in France exposed him to the challenges of raising capital and scaling a business, ultimately leading him to identify a significant gap in the market upon returning to Canada post-COVID, which inspired the creation of Zaparus. Kevin's central argument is that the MedTech industry has historically operated about five years behind the more sophisticated pharma and biotech sectors, particularly in areas like regulatory strategy, sales processes, and the adoption of modern business tools. He observed that while the biotech space had numerous fragmented market intelligence solutions, the MedTech industry lacked a centralized, automated platform to provide actionable insights. Zaparus was designed to fill this void, using machine learning to analyze public data like press releases and identify critical sales signals. For instance, the platform can alert a cybersecurity firm when a medical device company enters the design and prototype phase, indicating a timely opportunity to offer their services. The goal is to move MedTech service providers from reactive, inefficient methods like conferences and word-of-mouth to a proactive, data-driven approach that boosts sales efficiency and effectiveness. The discussion also explores broader market dynamics, including the impact of regulations on innovation and investment. Kevin contends that, contrary to popular belief, stricter regulations such as the EU's MDR and IVDR can actually foster a more stable and predictable environment, thereby attracting more investment. The podcast underscores the growing necessity for MedTech startups to prioritize cybersecurity and commercial strategy from the outset. As investors become more discerning and regulatory bodies like the FDA increase their scrutiny, having a robust plan for security and growth is no longer an afterthought but a critical factor for survival and success. The conversation concludes by emphasizing that in an increasingly competitive and consolidating market, proactive planning and the adoption of advanced tools are essential for companies looking to scale, secure funding, and remain viable.

Hi, welcome back to another episode of the Med Device Cyber podcast. Today we have a guest Kevin from Zapyrus and we're going to be talking about a little bit about market intelligence and how it ties into cyber security and we're excited to talk about uh his SAS platform which has changed marketing and the industry quite a bit. It's very uh very forward thinking uh because it's very focused on Medtech. So welcome to the podcast Kevin and you're coming to us from right outside Toronto. Is that right today? Kevin: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me on the podcast. I'm super excited to to spend some time together and have some fun. Host: Awesome. Well, you want to tell us a little bit about uh your background in the industry, Kevin and maybe like what the impetus was for Zapyrus and you know, how things are going for you today. Kevin: I came from the research world, um, in the early days. So, uh, technical, technical space, right? Um, I worked, my PhD was in, uh, chemistry, technically, um, but translational chemistry. So I was focusing on the application side of things. So developing portable uh diagnostic devices, instrumentation, um nanofabrication, I was in the clean room all the time. Um, doing tissue engineering work as well, which, you know, we're starting to see a bunch of new cool companies come out, uh, through the innovation of those materials and and technologies, uh, out of universities. So that, that was kind of my roots. And then I I got super curious in the entrepreneurial side because um, through that work, I was able to have published some patents, you know, papers and things like that and and wanted to see, you know, how do you take it beyond that and create larger impact in in the community and the in the space. And that took me into the startup world. Spent some time in France working at a liquid biopsy, uh, company there. I was a chief operating officer there, you know, raising capital, doing all the fun startup stuff that's uh, or broke startup stuff that's, you know, pitching and begging for VC money and things like that. So that was like pre-COVID. Post-COVID came back to Canada and then, um, shortly after Zapyrus was born out of COVID and we've been scaling out ever since. Host: And what was the, how did you see like the need, uh, to start Zapyrus? Like, what was the, the reason you basically built Zapyrus? Like, what was the need you felt needed to be filled? Kevin: Yeah. So I so at the time, the... the I I look at the healthcare space as a whole, right? Healthcare space, we can break it up into pharma, biotech, and then we've got like Medtech, and then consumer healthcare stuff, right? And so Medtech from a regulatory sophisticated, like sales sophistication, company sophistication is historically has been, you know, five, minimum five years behind life sciences, like pharma and biotech, right? Um from a regulatory standpoint. Host: So so just to be clear, you're saying you feel like the Medtech industry is five years behind pharma for uh regulatory? Kevin: A variety of different things. Yeah, it starts with the regulatory and then, and then it bleeds down into the innovations, tools using the space, sales team structure and sophistication. um, just by the nature of investment into that vertical, you're going to get more, you know, polished systems and processes and companies, right? Uh, and so at the time, you know, in the biotech space, uh, there were a lot of cool solutions that help more efficiently and effectively connect um businesses together, B2B, right? Through market intelligence. And so there was this transition between, I guess, going to the library to get information to like the internet, the the Google Age and the, you know, Yahoo searching age. So the information age then, what was born out of that were traditional databases, basically digitized curation of information in a platform, right? And then you saw the emergence of like selling contacts. That was such a taboo, you know. Like there were firms that are just scraping people's contact info in the early days. Think about like ZoomInfo in the early days. They're, they're installing like crawlers in people's browsers and and like take contacts out of people's emails unwarranted, you know. And then regulation caught up and like, "oh, you can't do that anymore." And so now, and then all of a sudden overnight, their contacts' quality plummet because they're not allowed to like do that thing anymore. And so then it became the emergence of like the database platforms and then the contact search platforms, right? And this, these were all fragmented solutions that's aimed to try to help out the business developers and marketers in the the space to be able to grow their business more effectively. Beyond just going to conferences, shaking hands, word of mouth, and just like SEO marketing stuff, right? Inbound things. And so what we saw was like a gap to be able to do that in a niche industry to help Medtech service providers specifically, centralize all of the jobs to be done and automate a lot of the the pieces that are involved in um business development research and having that data be sales and marketing actionable and not just data for the sake of having data, right? And so we saw an opportunity there to be able to say, okay, well, if we can maximize sales efficiency and sales effectiveness, that's really all sales and marketing people and business owners really want. They don't want to spend time hours and hours and hours processing data, turning through data, qualifying data. They want to sell and grow their business. And so if we can shorten the time frame from here's information and here's how to use it as it it pertains to your business, then we have a real value proposition that, you know, can help businesses scale and grow, no matter the team size. And so that's why we injected machine learning to be able to say, okay, instead of manually reading and processing press releases and stuff to try to find a signal in the market, we'll just let the machine learning and AI do that for you and we'll just present you those signals and triggers and say, okay, well this company is heading into design and prototype stage. Right around that time is where they're going to start to look at regulatory strategy, cybersecurity stuff, and you know, all that stuff. So now's a good time to connect with that that type of company, right? And so that's that's kind of the gap we saw. We saw like tools trying to be combined to create what is Zapyrus? And so we just created the thing that combines everything into one. Host: Trevor, what do you think about from pharma versus Medtech and cyber security? You agree like we're five years behind? Cuz it seems like at least in the United States, the FDA is just now starting to require things that should have been required quite some time ago from a cyber security lens. Trevor: Yeah, and I mean we can even think about some of the main standards that we adhere to like IEC 62304 is focused on secure development in medical devices and its latest version of it from 2006. So I completely agree. I think that a lot of these especially regulatory problems fall to the back end. Um, you know, regulatory moves famously slow no matter what, but I feel like especially in the healthcare industry, it can move even slower since there's less room for error. But it seems to be especially pronounced with medical devices, yeah. Kevin: It's it's cool. So what we see in the market, right? I don't know if you guys read our recent, uh, financial report for the H1 2025 of this year in the Medtech space. If you haven't, I'll send it to you after. Super interesting. Because I think what investors and what the market likes is certain... like security. Cyber security no pun intended, but yes, security in terms of predictability in the market. And so what people thought would be uh will make the market chaotic in terms of the IVDR and MDR update, you know, updating the regulation in the EU side. People thought like, okay, it's going to stifle innovation, it's going to make it slower to go to market. Um, investors are going to be more shy towards, you know, investing in the European market. Well, what our data showed was actually the opposite. In this past quarter, Q2, Europe surpassed North America in terms of rate of growth in in financial investment in Medtech. And that's off of the updated IVDR and MDR regulatory um update on on some of the software as medical device stuff but also traditional medical device in IVD. It's and it's because of that stability of like, oh, okay, we know what the regulations are now and now we feel comfortable in investing that dollar in there. And I think once the FDA kind of catches up and stabilizes their decisions around, okay, what what are we going to do for software as medical device, purely or connected devices from a um cybersecurity regulation standpoint. It it should flip back in terms of like investment dollars coming back into the US over the next three quarters. Well, the data is super interesting. We saw we wouldn't have guessed that, right? Um in terms of like, oh, up regulation, more investment into that market. But the data is showing us otherwise. It's it's seeing the money flow to Europe. Host: So the fact that the US is a little more volatile, I mean we've also had like a presidential change and a few other things that might affect the dynamic. Uh, some layoffs at the FDA. Trevor: Lots of regulatory changes, lots of uh general changes in the US. Host: Yeah, and then it's a good point. I know the FDA kind of leads the forefront with cyber security, uh, but just in June of 2025, they finally finalized their cyber security guidance uh that was in draft from September of 2023. So, you know, almost two years later it took them to finalize something. Kevin: Yeah, it's yeah the, the pace is so it's interesting in the healthcare space, right? the the Med device space. Cuz for us, cyber security is top of mind as a data company. It's like number one, right? Because we're always thinking about that. We're like, what if we have a security breach? We're a SAS platform. What if, you know, how do we control client data versus market data, right? Like how do we ensure...? So we hire pen testers permanently to constantly try to breach our systems. We have cyber security just top of mind always because of that. Um, and with the emergence of large language models in the past couple of years, right, with with the whole ChatGPT stuff, Google doing their thing, it's really opened up traction for connected devices and pure software as medical devices in the Medtech space. And that has really fueled the growth in the Medtech market. And so we're seeing cyber security be top of mind for a lot of people, right? Especially if they're updating their, you know, "dumb" devices to smarter devices. And, you know, pushing data to the cloud, they have to cross that bridge. And the sooner they cross that bridge, the better they are because investors are asking those questions. They're like, if if you want to connect to the cloud, what's going on with your cyber security plan? Like, how are you going to ensure that that is not going to get leaked or, you know, patient data is not going to go sideways. So it's here to stay, I think, and it's it's just going to be bigger and bigger market in the Medtech space. Trevor: I feel like cyber security sort of gets treated like insurance where it's not something that anyone thinks about. It's not something that anyone cares about until something goes wrong. That's the only point where cyber security becomes, I guess, immediately at the forefront of people's mind. Oftentimes when we're talking to prospects or clients, and they're coming to us, sometimes they're seeing people come years in advance to talk about cyber security. And I'll ask sometimes, "you know, why are you coming in so early into this process?" And more often than not, they go, "oh, you know, I've worked for security companies in the past. I know what can happen," or "oh, I was part of a like healthcare data breach," something like that where they have, they've seen the downstream effects so they get the severity, so they're coming in a little bit earlier. But if you haven't seen that, it might not be at the forefront of mind. So I think Christian and I are a little bit close to the problem where it's all we do all day every day. So we go, "of course, why wouldn't you only think about this? Why wouldn't this always be at the front of your mind?" But for a lot of a lot of manufacturers, they haven't been exposed to it. Host: Well, plus they have a lot of other things to figure out also. Kevin: Yeah. You guys have the same problem as we do, sort of, where like we get a lot of the inbounds that we get, or the clients that we get, um, coming to us are the ones that are like, too late. It's like, "oh my gosh, we're not hitting our targets." And so now we're going to look for some stuff midyear. And like, it's like, well, this is not a magic bullet. You got to like proactively build out your process so that you know, you future proof, kind of, your commercial strategy a little bit there, right? Like don't, don't come to us midyear and be like, "help us hit our targets towards the end of this year." It's like, okay, let's talk about the next year. Like, I mean, let's, let's implement it now. Host: And that's what people come... when do people come to you? That's when they come to us. It's like, "to break the glass and pull the alarm" kind of thing at the last minute. Kevin: Yeah, and it's, it's, we right a same thing. We're like, well, when we talk to a new client, we're like, okay, think about it like, I know it's working now. Like, you know, you you got word of mouth traction as you're growing, right? You, you got word of mouth traction, you know, your conferences are converting. Um, you, you've got website visits. It's like, great, it's good to hit your target this year. If you've got a growth rate if you want to double or triple growth in the next couple years, you have to kind of future proof your commercial strategy. What, going to conferences again is not going to hit a doubling of growth target. So you got to slowly build and add to your repertoire proactively, not within that year and you're like, okay, well, it's June now and we didn't see our, you know, first half conversion. So now what do we do? It's kind of like... chicken or the end of the year type thing. So I can, I see flashbacks when you mention your problem, I see flashbacks to my problem too. Host: I think we've had a couple fairly recent scenarios that have come up that I hope will help drive the importance of cyber security and considering it sooner than later. Uh, one of them was the Illumina case that was a first, um... case. I think one of the first cases where somebody um blatantly lied about their security controls and got a device into an environment. And the other one was a healthcare app that we had AI on it and the AI told a suicidal patient after a few months to go ahead and kill themselves and the patient did kill themselves. So we've got a couple cases in the lime light that I think will help bring cyber security to the forefront. Um, you want to elaborate a little bit on those cases, Trevor and what your thoughts are? Trevor: Definitely. I think the Illumina one is especially interesting even if it's a little bit less dramatic since there was no proven vulnerability in the system. It wasn't that there was a big breach or big hack that led to an investigation on how that happened. A whistleblower came forward saying that Illumina, you know, recognized there were vulnerabilities in a product that they were selling on the market. That was all it took. And so there was no way, no one was able to prove that the vulnerabilities were actually in effect and present and, you know, dangerous in the use case. It was just that Illumina was not addressing this securely and uh, it came under the False Claims Act. So they were essentially falsifying evidence of cybersecurity compliance to the FDA. So then the FDA came in with the Department of Justice and Illumina ended up settling in the case. But it was quite a big undertaking and a little bit of a disruption, especially since Alumina has historically had some problems with cybersecurity and regulatory in the past. So, a little bit of a, a little bit of a complicated problem there. Host: Well, what's, what's also interesting about that is we have quite a few clients and several of them, uh, came to us after the Illumina case and like, are we doing our due diligence? And we do our due diligence all along, but you know, we would give push back like, well, this is really a vulnerability you to fix. And now they're finally coming to us saying, have we fixed enough? Are we, we don't want to be like, you know, in the news like Illumina was. So it's, it's, it's worked in our favor because people are now taking the things we say seriously, like you need to fix this critical or high vulnerability because it could affect a patient. Trevor: Conversations went from like good enough to what is the absolute maximum security we can put in this device. We got to make it like the Alcatraz of medical devices. Kevin: That's what I be like, you need to be thinking about, especially if you're bringing a, you know, high risk device to market, right? Like it's it's not like a class one device. You you're bringing a class three device to market, you got to be thinking about patient safety and like you got to be doing your due diligence maximized safety of that device from a physical engineering standpoint, but also from a digital standpoint. Especially if you've got, you know, machine learning in there that maybe connects to your, you know, you got a smart drug delivery IV unit, right? That is like monitoring your heart rate, monitoring all these vital signs and it's adapting the dosage of the drug in response to all the measurements of the wearable device that you have. And so there's data flows all over the place between the wearable device to that instrumentation, to the processing cloud engine, then drive it back down if it's not a local software that's, you know, making that determination if it's doing it, you know, off device. All of that stuff can be breached and then one error could like overdose the patient, they, they could be impacted from OD on a drug medication. So now, now what? Like if that happens, right? Um and that's scary. That's scary stuff. If you're a large company, maybe like you have one incident, you know, you you have a dip in in your revenue because of that or a dip in investment, you might be able to still survive. If you're a small medium-sized company, an incident like that could basically bankrupt your entire company like... especially when more and more competitors come to market like we're seeing in Medtech. If you're a monopoly, fine, there's nowhere else to go. But if there's 10 other solutions that people could turn to, and that's where it's headed is like the market becomes more and more competitive, right? Then you can't afford a a mess up like that. Host: You want to elaborate a little bit about that AI case, Trevor cause we I think we talked about that in one episode we recorded. Trevor: It's interesting how problems are coming up in AI and in a large language model such as the example that you're talking about. There are so many different controls and considerations that go into AI that are so new, I don't think that people fully understand exactly how that works and how to best use it at this point. And it's going to be the same with any new technology. It takes a while to fully understand what are the problems with it, what are the limitations, what is, you know, the effective use of this in in a clinical environment. Is this even the appropriate use case to begin with? I know, you know, living in San Francisco, every single billboard is saying something about AI, but I actually do see, uh, on the way going right down that way. I see this ad about AI therapists and I see them all over the place. And you really have to be careful. A, if you're taking in sensitive information about an individual, what is it doing with that information? How is it responding? Is it learning? Is it changing based on that information? How how do you know if it's changing in a good way or in a bad way. There are so many considerations just with AI safety before even getting into security that can be really, really important to think about. Then of course, moving into security, AI is a process a lot of very sensitive information. How are you able to control the training set? Where is it storing this information? What knowledge bases is it pulling out of? Is it pulling out of intentionally malicious knowledge bases? There's a lot that can go into an AI model and I know we always talk about the garbage in, garbage out concept when it comes to AI. And I think that especially when you're dealing with something sensitive, something medical, it you need to have only really high, clean quality going into your AI, otherwise you run the risk of something bad like that happening. Host: Or are there actually signs that say AI therapy, you can like call a number to see, talk to an AI therapist there, are you just making that up? Trevor: I'm 100% serious. I'll take it, I'll take a picture next time I go buy one. Host: I think that's way too premature. especially based on that case where the patient, the AI told the patient to go ahead and kill themselves. I think I don't think we're we have enough about AI to implement it in that sort of environment. I think the risk is way too high personally. Trevor: Just because they could doesn't mean they should. Host: Cool. And what, what do you think about uh, you so like you're using machine learning AI quite a bit. I mean your models different as you use for market intelligence and and sales enablement versus like, you know, recommending therapy, being a therapist for a patient. What do you think about uh where we are with AI and Medtech? Kevin, you think it's too premature or ready for it? Kevin: I think it's changing very quickly that regulators have a hard time keeping up with any regulation. to like, you almost have to, as as a founder or a leader of a Medtech company, you almost have to take the ownership and put the patient first and take the proactive steps to ensure that you have proper measures in place. you you're you almost need to like self-regulate the system so that you allow time for an a slow moving organization like the FDA to kind of catch up because it's changing so quickly and I think you guys know this from large language models is one component of it, but it's it's changing so quickly even traditional, yeah, machine learning algorithms. Um, any anything you connect digitally is is open for exposure so and and the rate of computing power is just increasing and so because of that, it makes it easier to penetrate into any, any piece of software, any piece of digitized um intel, right? So I think, I think on the innovation side, we're definitely ready for it. It's going to speed up innovation. It's going to make devices smarter, like traditional devices smarter. Um, in terms of, you know, our companies ready to be responsible for turning that stuff on. I'm not sure if the regulation is is up to spec yet and if they don't have a mechanism to continuously update more frequent than traditional methods, then we might see a lot of real world cases, uh, play out um, more and more in the market, right? Because regulation in the drug space, right? Like from the chemistry background, I would say that, you know, it takes a while to develop a new molecule that can biochemically interact with the human body as an active pharmaceutical ingredient that treats a disease or manages the symptom of some sort. you know, the rate of innovation from a like a hard science standpoint is slow enough where the regulation can keep up with that pace of progression. In the pharma space, they can't connect with AI. They can connect it maybe through drug discovery platform, but that's not impacting the patient in terms of making meaningful, uh, disease changes to the patient, right? But in the device space, device technology is an engineering problem, not a chemistry problem. And so AI can integrate with hardware quite nicely there. And because of that, the rate of software progression is much faster than hardware and is and hardware is much faster than technical science and physics and biochemistry. And that's where I think the challenge is going to be in regulators trying to keep up with the changes in the different versions of how smart AI is now and and the computational power. Um just look at what Nvidia is doing. I think, just whatever they're doing is going to speed up computational power, which is going to expose more on the cybersecurity for that. Trevor: I think it's pretty interesting how the growth of computational power is just so exponential. It's uh, I can't remember the rule, but it's like 10 times increase every 2.7 years, something like that. It is taking off at a pretty incredible rate and talking about how complexity can affect this. Something that we always talk about with network security and counterintuitively, it's often easier to find bigger problems and bigger vulnerabilities in bigger companies. Um, some of the most severe vulnerabilities that I've ever found during penetration tests were against, you know, Fortune 500 companies because there are so many different components and they have such complicated systems. It just takes one problem, one miss path, one misconfiguration across, you know, tens of hundreds of thousands of network devices compared to if you only have five, it's a lot easier to keep track of them and secure them. And so I think that if it can apply to a single device, we have multiple components, multiple technologies, and a wide range of complexity there. Um, more complexity isn't always a good thing. Kevin: Yeah, I mean on the Canadian side, uh, the federal government just announced a huge investment into AI and cybersecurity. Like um they've invested in the Canadian Center for Cyber security. Uh, separate from Health Canada. So like different countries are responding to this differently, right? I mean, yeah, speaking from the Canadian side where I think our government is is investing in that and making it for front, right? Because that that'll impact um voting fraud, that'll impact all sorts of stuff, right? Not just on the medic side, but obviously that unit, that Canadian Center for Cyber security is going to then help health Canada also regulate medical technologies from a cyber security side of things as well, or at least demand them to update their terms. Host: I want to talk about timing here, change the topic a little bit. So, because you brought up a point, Kevin, where people come to you about Zapyrus or about sales enablement or market intelligence, like when it's almost too late cause it's a, it's not like in in two weeks you can turn something around. It's a long process. You have to have the strategy behind it, behind the tool you're using as well. Um, so when should somebody come to your organization to start looking at adding functionality and capability to their, their sales process? Kevin: Yeah, I think a good kind of indicator is that if you're looking to grow beyond word of mouth and repeat business, that's when you start to look at do we need a CRM, do we need a contacts tool, do we need a database, do we need more intelligence to help us scale out the team and, uh, future proof the growth strategy, right? And also, when do you want to sell your company? And I'm speaking specifically to like small medium-sized companies or medium-sized companies that are looking to grow larger, right? Because investors look for, okay, what am I buying? Am I buying the founder or am I buying a proven out process and system? And so they're looking at those systems and we're selling to large companies all the time. A lot of large companies use us. And so they're going to look at, okay, well, large companies have established kind of best practices to grow and scale and be sustainable long term. And so if these medium companies that want to be acquired by larger companies or पीई firms that want to combine them, they're going to look at, okay, what are you, what are your systems like? And would they even integrate with these other companies we're looking to combine and purchase? And so if you want to eventually sell your company and kind of future proof your growth beyond just growing word of mouth and going to conferences, that's when you should start looking into this and start to look into a solution like ours. If you're just happy with not, you know, you're like, hey, we're good. Just trying to keep the lights on here, we're not looking to, you know, grow and scale this thing or then you probably don't need any tool. You probably just, you know, rely on your repeat business and reversals and things like that and you're probably good and we see a lot of that in the Medtech space from companies that, you know, are like 20 years old and they have 10 employees. Like that's a signal for us that they're probably not interested in in hyper growth or in growing that organization. Host: I wonder what the percentage is of companies that as you said just want to keep the lights on or 20 years old with 10 people versus the companies that are trying to scale very quickly. Kevin: I think there is a a market pressure that we've seen over the past three years of consolidation in the space. We saw that in the biopharmaceutical space five years ago. We're seeing that in Medtech now, right? You're seeing that across the board. Like you saw Avonia form between three different companies like Avonia, the clinical and Medtech. You saw MCRA just got purchased by IQVIA. That's a consolidation, right? You saw um matrix one, you know, um data got acquired by firm that matrix requirements now they merge into one company that combine solution. So we're seeing consolidation in the market and that consolidation is going to make it more competitive against those smaller shops that only do one thing. And that are just coasting. And so if they don't future proof, even if they're like, oh, we're fine right now, they're going to take that client that you're relying on repeat business with. And then now you're forced to hunt. And by that time it could be too late, right? So we're going to see a lot of those smaller folks that are just have been stagnant over the past 5 to 10 years. They're probably going to close down shop. receive some already. Close down shop. Um they're they're not purchasable because they don't have a large enough look of business. They they've never built the process that make it attractive to purchase um and consolidate with other companies. And so, yeah, consolidation, I think is going to shift the market towards basically tightening up your shit from a commercial strategy and commercial tooling. Host: Yeah, I get approached by firms all the time wanting to acquire Blue Goat, uh, and often they're they're saying we have this portfolio, we want to consolidate our capabilities and you know, I'm not interested in selling, but I want to build a business that's scalable and has processes where it's not relying on me, obviously. Uh, but I also think there's value in being super niche in what you, what you offer versus offering everything. Because I I have found in the past that you can't be super great at offering everything. You can be a little bit good at most of those things versus being really good if you just do one thing very well. Kevin: Yeah, and I think the difference you guys is like you're really great at doing uh something in the niche but you're interested in growth. That's like the different differentiator. Some business are not interested in growth. I've seen in the. Host: What they say if you're not if you're not growing, you're dying in business, that's kind of like. Kevin: That's what I be. Yeah, that's what I be. I'm like, what? I'm like, how do you? Anyway, um we've seen a handful. It's not the majority, thankfully. It's it's the minority, right? Um and it's the minority for a reason. Like you pick a market. If that's kind of your your approach to business in any market you're eventually going to die. I mean just look at the restaurant market, right? Restaurants that don't look to grow will then be out competed by the ones that do. look to grow. Um on the same street, right? Like all of a sudden like nobody's going to that restaurant that was popular, you know, a year ago. Host: And I know in cyber security we always say people should come to us Trevor does say early and often uh kind of like what you're advocating Kevin. I guess it depends on your strategy though. Uh for us it depends on strategy too. If you want to get approved sooner than later by the FDA or whichever regulatory authority uh from a cyber security perspective, the sooner you come to us, the more likely you'll get approved quicker, uh quicker than your competitors at less expense and less frustration. Kevin: Yeah, and it also increases your chance of uh future investments too because investors are saying that as like, oh that's no longer a risk for concern, right? a cause for concern. They're like, oh they've got that figured out. They're already talking about that. It's the same thing as like human factors engineering, right? Doing that early will avoid any setback around like you're trying to then go to clinical and then all of a sudden it's like, oh that's not how people use that product in a real case thing. It's like, okay, let's go back and now do the human fact. Like, well now you you could have started your clinical study, but now you got to wait a year out and then you're burning cash, your runway's narrowing and all of a sudden that technology never makes it to market because you made one decision to not, you know, dought your eyes and cross your teeth early enough. Trevor: We've seen with uh cyber security companies. I think our longest set of delays that we've ever seen company coming to us with was around 12 months of FDA delays from cyber security and this was a really big company. They had, you know, money to go through this process. They had the runway. They were large publicly traded company with a wide range of products. This was not going to be the end of the world for them. It's frustrating, it's difficult, but they got through it. Now, imagining a similar situation with a startup where, you know, everything's on a shoe string budget and they're trying to make everything work and getting delayed for a full year, that can that can kill companies like that just from a cyber security problem. Kevin: Oh yeah, like these startups, you know, I was in one, the cash runway is not, it's like a couple months out. Like if you don't raise in like six months, you're out like you can't pay your employees. You got to pause R&D. you got to like, you know, lean out before you can scale out again. So it's like this endless cycle of like how much runway you have with this round you just raised. And what are you going to do in that time period to ensure that you raise the next rap. And if you don't mitigate your risks, people don't want to invest in you in the next round, then you you're you run out of time. Host: Yeah, if you haven't proven yourself in a prior round, why would somebody invest in you in the next round, right? Kevin: Yeah, exactly. Host: Cool. We're we're coming up on time here. So I usually ask, you know, if anyone has any last thoughts, partying words or last questions here. So I'll start with Trevor first and throw it over to you Kevin. Trevor: I'm gonna go with the classic on this and that's just consider your cybersecurity early and often. Leaving it to the end, that's when you're getting these big delays, that's when you're facing all of these regulatory hurdles, which doesn't need to be that way. If you're addressing cybersecurity early, you're designing your device safely and securely, you're going to have all of the evidence of that inherently and then you aren't going to run into these regulatory problems. So early and often. Host: We got to get you to say something more original next time. All right. What about you, Kevin, any um, last minute questions or partying words of wisdom? Kevin: I agree with Trevor in terms of cyber security thing, right? Early and often just like any strategic work, I think early and often is is um is good to check in on. Um, from I guess I should probably say something about Zabira. Um, words of wisdom, let me see. I think if you, if you want to stop banging your head around testing, you know, different tools and trying to figure out scaling out your commercial plan long term and just want a one-stop shop solution to scale your Medtech business growth, if you're a Medtech service provider, um, we're really your CRM's best friend. so it's it's just us and your around. That's all you really need. I would consider it. Um if not us, I would definitely consider a streamlined solution that can help you with sales research automation to maximize your sales efficiency and an effectiveness. Host: All right, I like, I like it. And we, at Blue goat, we use Zapyrus. And it's a great tool. I think that the the aspect that a lot of people neglect though, you can have all these great tools, but if you don't have a process or a strategy on how to incorporate the information from Zapyrus for instance, into your sales process and your sales team knows how to do that, then that tool is only going to be, you know, so valuable. So you have to have that behind the scenes uh strategy as well. At least that's what I found because I I'm very process driven. I feel like anything should be that I want to scale my business, it should be a process and it should be repeatable and scalable and trainable to a new person that joins a team. Kevin:I take the same philosophy, right? Like you can give a drill to an expert carpet and give a drill to a DIY, two different results. It's the same drill. The same torque, the same, the same everything, right? So it's about how you use it, when you use it, what you use it for, you know, um, all of that is part of that and we take pride in in having the support team to be able to get, get online with users and be able to help customize strategy and implementation plans towards their specific team needs. Host: Awesome. Well, thanks so much Kevin for joining us today. We appreciate your time. and uh, thanks Trevor for tuning in from California. I'm glad you got your new driver's license, whatever you got over there. Trevor: It's finally over. Host: And thanks everyone for tuning in to the Medice Cyber podcast. Uh we hope to see you on the next one.