Mastering MedTech

Most founders think marketing can wait until they have a working prototype or need to raise money. By the time you need a pitch deck or professional website, it's already too late to do them well. Whit Slightham knows this from both sides. She's led communications for a multi-billion dollar biomedical research institute, founded Mesa Marketing to work with medtech startups, and she's c...

There are precisely two things that will sink a medtech company: finance and regulatory. Get either one wrong and you're done. Steve Duddy has spent decades in the CEO chair learning this lesson the hard way. In this episode, Steve shares why regulatory strategy must start on day one, what happens when founders try to outsmart the FDA, and why the best regulatory teams are the ones who will te...

FDA clearance used to feel like the finish line. Robert Hamilton thought so too when he founded NeuraSignal. Then he learned the hard way that regulatory approval is just the beginning. In this episode, Robert shares the journey from developing the world's first fully automated robotic system for cerebral blood flow monitoring to building a commercially successful medtech company with operatio...

Getting FDA clearance used to be the finish line. Now it's just the starting gate. Cindy Grabowski has watched medtech acquisition timelines stretch from three years to eight-plus years across her 30-year career, and she knows exactly why the rules changed. In this episode, she breaks down the 2012 turning point when big medtech companies shifted their acquisition criteria from regulatory appr...

Most technical founders spend years perfecting their device, only to discover there's no market willing to pay for it. Anita Bell has seen this pattern repeat hundreds of times in her 20+ years as Director of the University of Arizona Center for Innovation.  In this episode, Anita shares the harsh realities technical founders face when they fall in love with their technology instead of their c...

Great technology is not enough. Marco Flavio Marinucci has spent 20 years watching brilliant medtech products fail because founders didn't understand the healthcare ecosystem they were entering. In this episode, Marco breaks down why you need three different sales stories for three different stakeholders, why 40% of Americans reading at a sixth-grade level matters for your product design, and...

Seventy-one percent turnover. Production excursions every 89 days. Low engagement across the board. Graydon Hansen walked into Abbott's largest medical device plant in China facing these challenges and turned it into a top performer over five and a half years. In this episode, Graydon shares the two pillars of operational turnaround: getting your hands into everything and changing the way your...

Most medtech founders want to skip straight to building their product. Veronica Kingston has spent 30 years watching that approach lead to expensive recalls, failed regulatory submissions, and collapsed acquisition deals. As Senior Director of Quality Management Systems and Design Quality Assurance at Thermo Fisher Scientific, she's worked with startups, navigated mergers and acquisitions, and...

Starting a medtech company without legal guidance is like performing surgery without sterilizing your instruments. Elizabeth Parsons has seen brilliant innovations die not from failed technology, but from preventable legal mistakes that founders never saw coming. As principal of Elizabeth Parsons, PLLC and an NBCA Board member, she's watched founders give away equity to fraudsters, lose their...

AI is transforming clinical research faster than regulations can keep up. Olivia Longacre has spent over a decade on the front lines of global clinical trials, and she's watching MedTech companies make a critical mistake: treating AI as a replacement for human intelligence rather than a tool that requires constant oversight. With over 20,000 startups now working on software as medical devices,...

Rick Holecek walked into a quality nightmare: 27 open CAPAs from a botched audit report, a semi-paper-based system struggling to keep up with growth, and a small team stretched impossibly thin. As VP of Quality at Irrimax, a wound irrigation company that's grown from 30 to 76 employees in six years, Rick had to make fast decisions that would either save or sink the company's regulatory sta...

In this episode of Mastering MedTech , host Melita Ball sits down with Marie Wesselhoft, President and Co-founder of ZelosDx, to discuss what it really takes to build and scale a medtech startup on the bleeding edge of innovation. With more than 35 years in healthcare innovation and diagnostics, Marie shares hard-won lessons on navigating pivots, understanding the true value of strategic partnersh...

Bringing a medtech device to market is complex—but it doesn’t have to be chaotic. On Mastering MedTech, regulatory strategist and MBCA Consulting founder Melita Ball helps founders navigate the path from concept to clearance. This podcast demystifies the regulatory maze, offers proven startup frameworks, and unpacks real stories from founders, engineers, and compliance experts. Whether you’re buil...