From what the Founder Knows to what the Market Embraces
I work with life sciences and healthtech founders at two critical transitions:
Finding their commercial voice that gets the market to listen.
Knowing when there’s enough evidence and repeatability to make the first commercial hire.
First Voice. First Hire
30+ years in industry and 15+ years commercializing complex healthcare and life sciences technologies; from founder led companies to global enterprise scale.
Two questions worth asking before you build your commercial organization.
First Voice
Does the market understand what you see?
Technical founders often know their subject better than anyone around them. That doesn’t mean the market understands why their company matters.
Find the ideas, evidence and point of view that make your expertise commercially relevant and turn them into a voice the market recognizes as your own.
First Hire
Are you ready for someone else to sell it?
Your first commercial hire shouldn’t be expected to discover the business you haven’t figured out yet.
Before making the hire, determine what founder-led selling has actually taught you, what is repeatable, what can be transferred, and what the next commercial leader is being hired to do.
“I help founders say what the market actually needs to hear”
I’ve been there before.
For more than 30 years, I've helped commercialize complex healthcare and life sciences technologies from finding the story a market will respond to, to building the team that can take it forward.
Different question. Different technologies. There recurring question was the same:Different question:
DNAnexus
Joined at roughly $5M in revenue, built the first global sales organization, and helped the company grow to approximately $45M.
Health Catalyst
Helped rethink a life sciences business that hadn't worked the first time, starting with what pharmaceutical companies actually needed rather than what we wanted to sell.
Betteromics
Helped a founder-led company sharpen its enterprise story and generated six qualified six-figure opportunities within four months.
Form Bio
Helped test a promising new commercial direction and learned that the market wasn't supporting the business model we hoped it would.
Ideas
I write about the assumptions behind commercialization in life sciences and healthtech; especially the ones worth questioning.
