Remember Juicero? The company that, in three years (2014-2017), burned through $120 million of venture funds building a $700 juicer requiring a special juice packet for each glass.
Following in that product’s footsteps, robotics company Vincross is planning to apply some of their consumer product knowledge to create a new product that is the equivalent of the Jucerio, except it will probably cost more.
The HEXA Plant is designed to look like a six-legged spider and can help anyone keep up with their plants even if they don’t have time to keep up with them. (…) Not only will the planter carry itself into the sunlight when needed – but it will find shade if the plant gets too hot. (…) The robotic planter is designed to stomp around or throw ‘tantrums’ when it is out of water…
The original HEXA robot sells for $949, so it’s unlikely the planter will cost less.
Here’s the robot, use your imagination to turn it into a plant pot.
And start saving, so you can finally have a plant that doesn’t die.
WinterTech is a conference with perfect focus on the pulse of digital health investing.
This one day San Francisco symposium, held in parallel with JP Morgan Week, brings together top tech companies, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs to explore the present and future digital health landscape.
Here are my five major takeaways:
THREE OR LESS HEALTH TECH IPO’S IN 2018: the venture capitalist panel notes that 2018 will yield less than three health tech IPO’s and over $12 billion in digital health investments. Digital Health companies historically have not produced outsized IPO returns on the order of LinkedIN, Facebook and Google.
TSA PRE-CHECK COMES TO THE FDA: The future of health is a TSA Pre-Check style program for FDA approvals for software as a medical device. Click for additional details,
MOST CHRONIC DISEASE IS REVERSIBLE: A panelist cited the National Institute of Health statistic that “86% of disease is lifestyle driven and reversible.” Meanwhile, 185 million Americans have one or more chronic diseases.
DIGITAL THERAPEUTICS ARE THE FUTURE, YET 70% OF DOCTORS HAVE NEVER USED THEM: Digital Therapeutics are the use of a dedicated digital device, software, or both for prevention, chronic condition management, etc. According to a presentation by Patricia Mechael, PhD, MHS, 70% of neurologists and 70% of endocrinologists have never used digital therapeutics. Technology has the potential to positively impact health via patient behavior and ownership, improvements in patient care and data driven treatment decisions at the individual patient level.
THREE COMPANIES I LOVED:
Parsley Health focuses on the consumer not the insurer. 50 minute patient visits. Nutritional guidance. Advanced testing. The future of healthcare.
Buoy Health is a platform leveraging AI to easily check symptoms and identify the best options for care – before you go to the doctor.
Smart Contacts is the future of vision care. Renew contact lens prescriptions and take an eye exam via your phone. Yes!
A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read allIf the Shoe Fits posts here
It’s a know fact that the more you are “teacher’s pet” or a “favored player” the more you will be called on in class and the more playing time you’ll get.
Even in families, the most-favored-child typically succeeds more than their siblings.
And that favoritism usually results in more money, more introductions, more involvement, in fact, more everything, which results in substantially more innovation.
The data showed that companies tied to a competitor by at least one VC firm in common were indeed less innovative than those unencumbered by such ties; in fact, they were 30 percent less likely to introduce a new product in any given year.
It gets worse.
The UNfavored startups were 55 percent less likely to introduce a product.
Proximity mattered, too; those farther away from a shared investor were 56 percent less likely to introduce a new product.
What if your VC is part of the “golden circle?”
Companies tied to VCs in the top 25 percent of reputation indexes were significantly less likely to introduce new products in any given year.
Oops.
And I’m willing to bet similar stats apply to super angels, regular angels, incubators and the rest of the funding world.
Or the mindset of Jim Clark, as revealed by Michael Lewis, author of The New New Thing, a book about the tech industry in the late ’90s.
“At the end of The New New Thing, Jim Clark, who has made a fortune out of the internet bubble, says he’s getting out because he’s scared. Why’s he scared? Kleiner Perkins, the VC firm, has given $25 million to this startup called Google, which he thinks is outrageous. Why would anyone give $25 million to Google? A search engine is just a commodity, everybody knows that, it’s a silly name.”
There are always experts who will tell you why whatever won’t work.
I’m not recommending that you just ignore or dismiss them.
What I am saying is that you need to take everything with a grain of skepticism and not buy it because of who says it.
The Gates Foundation has pumped $4.6 million into a startup called MicroCHIPS, which has developed an implant that is capable of delivering steady, regular doses of hormones to control fertility for up to 16 years. When a woman is ready to start a family, her doctor simply disables the implant remotely, and then restarts it when she wants to prevent additional pregnancies.
This could be a Harvard case study of what happens when an idea is funded without thinking through the possible hitches, glitches and repercussions.
In short, contraception is both a religiously and politically charged concept and everything is hackable. (Read the article for the details.)
The thing for entrepreneurs to remember is that what sounds great late at night after a few beers, among a group of like-minded folks whose excitement and enthusiasm feeds off each other or like a flash of genius or an epiphany may not stand up to cold logic and due diligence—not to mention possible ethical implications.
Were you shocked when you learned that the US didn’t make the top ten in healthcare, based on criteria of quality, access, efficiency, equity and healthy lives?
It’s fairly well accepted that the U.S. is the most expensive healthcare system in the world, but many continue to falsely assume that we pay more for healthcare because we get better health (or better health outcomes).
The top ten in order are United Kingdom, Switzerland, Sweden, Australia, Germany & Netherlands (tied), New Zealand & Norway (tied), France and Canada.
While the wealthiest Americans are outpacing many of their global peers, a New York Times analysis shows that across the lower- and middle-income tiers, citizens of other advanced countries have received considerably larger raises over the last three decades.
And while much of the discussion about economic inequality has centered on the top 1 percent, it’s the gap between the top 20 percent and the rest that’s more salient to young people. (…) This uncomfortable fact, which many economists have recently accepted, suggests that we are living not simply in an unequal society but rather in two separate, side-by-side economies.
But cheer up; you only have to be in the 95th percentile, not the 1%, to be back among the envied.
How can that be? What about all the jobs created by companies such as Google and Facebook?
As to American inventiveness and the much ballyhooed entrepreneurial spirit so richly displayed by a few Millennials, consider which actually is the most innovative country in the world.
Germany does a better job on innovation in areas as diverse as sustainable energy systems, molecular biotech, lasers, and experimental software engineering. (…) But the fairy tale that the U.S. is better at radical innovation than other countries has been shown in repeated studies to be untrue. Germany is just as good as the U.S. in the most radical technologies.
What’s more important, Germany is better at adapting inventions to industry and spreading them throughout the business sector. Much German innovation involves infusing old products and processes with new ideas and capabilities or recombining elements of old, stagnant sectors into new, vibrant ones.
Perhaps it’s time for us—business leaders, religious leaders, politicians of all flavors and just plain folks—to take our collective heads out of the sand and do what it takes to turn things around.
CEO John Chambers has been successfully reinventing Cisco Systems for 19 years, but his best innovation has a very low profile. In fact, this is the first time I’ve heard/read about it in the nine years it’s been around.
TacOps is a combination of people and equipment that bring emergency communications to areas devastated by both natural and manmade disasters.
Cisco has a special team called Tactical Operations that swoops in after natural disasters to get Internet and telephone service back up, so that rescue workers can do their jobs.
TacOps first response was in 2005 for Hurricane Katrina and its most recent to Typhoon Haiyan.
The cost of both equipment and manpower is totally funded by Cisco.
Nor does the team wait until things settle down; rather they are there with the first responders in a crisis when working communications are so critical to saving lives.
And while these deployments may showcase its equipment in a positive way you can be sure that’s not the driving factor.
If it was, we all would have heard a lot more about it over the last nine years.
So hats off to Cisco; it sure would be nice if more companies emulated its efforts in their own way.
Ask an entrepreneur how they are going to move their product and they’ll tell you that they are doing something “really cool” that will “go viral” and sometimes it actually does.
But why?
Why does one cat video garner a million views, while hundreds of others have only a few dozen?
Is there a silver bullet that assures your video will go viral?
Or at least a way to hedge your bets?
No to the first, but yes to the second.
A new book helps; it’s Jonah Berger’s ‘Contagious’: Why Things Catch On and I recommend it to anybody working to be heard through the noise.
I especially like the story of George Wright, a new marketing hire, who saw the potential in his CEO’s obsessive efforts to break the companies product.
But there’s a great example of a company, Blendtec, that actually made a blender video that’s gotten more than 10 million views…. They have a series of videos called “Will it blend?” — which has over 150 million views — where they stick all types of different things in a blender.
Not bad for what you have to admit is a pretty bland product.
This may be one of those times when the book is actually worth buying.
Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.
Crises never end.
$10 really does make a difference and you’ll never miss it,
It’s a know fact that the more you are “teacher’s pet” or a “favored player” the more you will be called on in class and the more playing time you’ll get.
