Jennifer Monti is a cardiologist who saw an opportunity to improve upon an important, but invasive and expensive, medical procedure common to her practice area.
Many, if not most, physicians would acknowledge the idea, but then get on with their busy lives. That probably goes for most professionals who come up with good ideas in their specific areas of expertise.
But Monti took the path less traveled by and co-founded a company to pursue the opportunity.
While a fellow in cardiology at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Monti in 2015 co-founded Shock Analytics. The company’s first product is a medical device to measure a patient’s “systemic vascular resistance,” a technical term for how hard a time your body’s having pushing blood through the circulatory system. SVR, as it’s known, is an important indicator for conditions such as congestive heart failure, sepsis, and shock. The standard procedure currently used to measure SVR is a a right heart catheterization, a very invasive and costly procedure, but Shock Analytics’ product will be non-invasive.
Not long after co-founding the company, Monti and her family move to Maine and she took a job as a cardiologist at MaineHealth.
“We moved because Maine Med is a great place to practice medicine, we loved the energy of the city, our kids have space to roam, and we see the ocean everyday,” Monti tells Maine Startups Insider.
Monti is currently Shock Analytics’ only full-time employee and serves as its CEO. The company recently completed a clinical trial and is now considering next steps for expanding the company’s R&D capabilities. Her goal for 2019 is for Shock Analytics to enter a partnership with an existing company that develops medical devices to expand the company’s dataset and to build a clinical-grade prototype.
Not only has Monti pursued her entrepreneurial path, she also wants to help others do so. Monti has not been at MaineHealth that long, but she’s already spearheaded the creation of an internal program that assists other physicians, faculty and staff to take their ideas for innovative products and services in the healthcare field and turn them into reality, whether that’s a working prototype or clinical trials. The Innovation Cohort, as it’s known, is essentially an internal accelerator program at the company.
“I wanted a pathway to support people who want to learn to think differently about their jobs, and who want to design and invent our way out of the complex problems of medicine and healthcare delivery,” she previously told MSI.
MSI spoke with Monti about her entrepreneurial journey, how she balances her full-time career as a cardiologist with building a startup, and the importance of talking to strangers. The Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.
MSI: What was your first entrepreneurial experience?
JM: I clearly remember handing out flyers to mow lawns in our neighborhood. I was about 11. We attracted one customer and I made twenty dollars.
When you first founded Shock Analytics, did you feel prepared?
I did not feel prepared to run a company; rather, I felt a strong urgency to solve a problem that was contributing to life threatening problems across a spectrum of diseases I was seeing on a daily basis. I felt a company was the best vehicle for solving this problem.
What’s been the largest challenge you have faced in starting/building your company?
The largest challenge for me has been accepting that I cannot know everything about each part of the business in all the detail I want. I cannot be expert in the computer science aspects and the biomedical aspects and the financing and the story telling and the day to day aspects of each piece. Letting go of that, trusting a team, continues to be a challenge.
How did you overcome that challenge? Or, if you’re still working through it, how are you handling it?
I have worked through this by recognizing my core strengths. My core strength is communicating the clinical problem we are trying to solve, designing clinical trials to prove or disprove our science, and selecting team members to expertly execute on the other core aspects of building a business.
What have been the personal challenges to founding a startup?
The biggest challenge is that so many interesting things happen at once. The opportunity to start Shock Analytics came just as I was transitioning to become a full-time physician, we were moving to Portland, and we had a three year old. There was literally no space for a start-up. That was not in the plan. I stay up at night thinking about these issues, working on the problems, in collaboration, because there is a direct line between this company and solving one of the central health challenges of our time. That excites me every single day. I feel as strongly about the need, and the relevance of our approach, as I did when we started.
“Most early investors are not so much investing in the idea; they are investing in the founder. That is a remarkable, unique sort of covenant I have not experienced in other venues.” -Jennifer Monti
Okay, enough about the challenges. What do you see as the positive aspects of entrepreneurship?
The best part of being an entrepreneur is putting capital at risk to fuel the growth and execution of a vision you really believe in. It is remarkable to feel the trust and enthusiasm and support that comes from folks who invest in ideas close to my heart. Most early investors are not so much investing in the idea; they are investing in the founder. That is a remarkable, unique sort of covenant I have not experienced in other venues.
What has surprised you about building a company?
I have been surprised by the importance of talking to strangers about the vision. Our first COO was my neighbor in Philadelphia. We started talking about the idea while shoveling our driveways right next to each other. I subsequently learned he had run several med device firms in the dental space. My CFO is a serial entrepreneur who would attend medical device bootcamp with me at Penn.
How did you fund the launch of the company?
Mom, Dad, self, one additional investor, and the Ben Franklin Technology Partners (a Pennsylvania version of MTI).
What is your future funding strategy?
We will either move forward with a strategic partner in a royalty/equity model, or raise ≈$4.2 million dollars to continue with device development to a clinical grade, FDA-ready device.
Will you need to go outside the state to fundraise and/or find strategic partners?
Yes, I think so. We certainly will welcome the interest of local investors but are most likely to tell our story to investors outside of Maine, too.
You moved to Maine not long after forming Shock Analytics. What benefits, if any, have you experienced from joining the Maine startup community?
I have received remarkable offers of assistance from the ecosystem here. I have been able to meet remarkable people, primarily from other industries, who have helped me think through strategy with different lenses. I have also been able to find excellent research and data scientist team members here.
Have you benefited from mentors?
My mentors in this space have been somewhat limited because there are not that many physician-entrepreneurs who have taken this path. My most valuable mentors have come from other business sectors and really helped me under some of the core business fundamentals that are relevant to any sort of business.
What are your long-term goals for the business?
I am interested in Shock Analytics becoming a vehicle for a series of medical device technologies that focus on unique challenges in the diagnostic space. Our lead product is a device to non-invasively estimate a value that is currently estimated through invasive means. The most likely exit here is a sale of this technology to a large medical device firm that make monitoring equipment used in every care venue. However, we are prepared to sell this device off the shelf. Estimating market size can be tricky for devices like this; we know we are selling into a market for diagnostics that is valued at ≈$16.8 billion dollars, and growing exponentially as problems like congestive heart failure and sepsis cause more challenge from Maine to Madagascar.
You also run the Innovation Cohort at Maine Med. What has been your takeaway from being on the other side of things and seeking to help potential entrepreneurs?
My biggest takeway in starting the innovation cohort has been the confirmation that Maine Med is full of very skilled physicians, researchers, and allied staff, with deep expertise and clinical experience, that lends itself extremely well to describing the problems they see and the solutions that people need to take better care of patients. The projects that are coming out of the cohort are deeply relevant to the health problems of Maine, address large markets of global importance, and are driven by thoughtful, committed caregiver who invent from empathy. That is a very powerful place to start and it is a real delight to be inspired by, and help cultivate, their work across a range of sectors.
If you could give two pieces of advice to someone thinking of starting their own business, what would they be?
1) Talk to strangers and 2) Remind yourself relentlessly of the big vision. This will help you through the tedious days and the low, low times.
