Why this former spine surgeon built an incubator for healthcare startups in Seattle (GeekWire)
"We recognized that there was this pain point both on the entrepreneurial side, as well as the industry side."
Dr. Jeffrey Roh started his career as an entrepreneur after creating a method for a less invasive form of spine surgery. He started knocking on the doors of spine companies to sell the idea and got what many first-time entrepreneurs experience: lots of rejections.
Eventually, he landed a buyer that would later take the technology to a number of surgical platforms — but only after discovering a brand new opportunity. We recognized that there was this pain point both on the entrepreneurial side, as well as the industry side.
“We recognized that there was this pain point both on the entrepreneurial side, as well as the industry side,” Roh said. Here was the problem: large healthcare businesses had shifted their appetite away from internal research and development teams in favor of acquiring companies. But life science companies need lots of early-stage support, which is hard to come by.
Roh took a page from the tech industry’s handbook and started an incubator in Seattl...
