How to Build a Clear Path to Revenue that Attracts Investors and Acquirers | LSI USA '25

Alex Wakefield  0:04  
Chris, thanks a lot for your time and attention. We're going to go through a few topics that we think is very interesting and relevant for this crowd. We talked earlier, and we think it would be awesome if we had a conversation. So there's sort of four main categories. So rather than hold your questions at the end, if you have them, go ahead and ask them during the topic that we're talking about. I guess it's easier to review the recording if you speak into the mic. If not, I'll repeat the question. But thanks for your attendance. We'll jump in. So we are going to talk about, how do you build a predictable, recurring revenue path and ultimately moving into a sustainable business. So I'm gonna let these guys introduce themselves. They're the experts at hand, and I am kind of more of the software guy that sells into the space. So I'll do a quick intro at the end. I'll hit the next slide, but let's start to my immediately, immediate left here with Jeff Byrne, formerly of art alone, who just exited to Stryker. So Jeff will give you a little bit of background.

Jeff Byrne  1:07  
I'm Jeff Byrd. Really happy to be here. Exciting topic, as Alex said, formerly of ardalon, so I was the CFO there, and so happy to exit to Stryker over last summer. And I'm passionate about revenue and revenue metrics and understanding your revenues and the importance there. So generally, my background has been high, small growth, venture back companies. And really enjoy that. The perspective of, you know, tracking, tracking revenues, and excited, excited about the conversation today.

Alex Wakefield  1:38  
Awesome. Thanks, Jeff. So Jeff obviously brings the financial perspective, the fundraising perspective, the conversation. And then to his left, Andrew Morris is Chief Commercial Officer of mayo one, and mayo one is a current customer of acuity. MD, and he's got some perspectives from growing that organization. Large strategics have been part of in the past, but I'll let him introduce himself. Andrew great. And hi

Andrew Morris  1:59  
everybody. Andrew Morris, hopefully I can bring something other than just being a cop. Just being a customer to the panel today. But my background is, is really, you know, Jeff said he's passionate about revenue. I'm passionate about revenue, but I'm really passionate about patients and surgeons. I mean, have been my entire career. I think my career started at Smith and Nephew, really, in this independent, independent distribution world. And it's so funny to see Mr. Todd Houston in the in the crowd, because that's when I started my career. And there really was this entrepreneurial spirit, and we really picked up all of these different lines. And it was, it was really working intimately, close with our with our surgeons. And then really, as I sort of grew my career, understood how you can, can really change your commercial strategy based on whether you're with a strategic and then my last 10 years with another startup, and then now with this startup, mile one out of Montreal, has just been an amazing ride. So I think I have a unique set of experiences, and can't wait to dive into some questions

Alex Wakefield  2:58  
here. Awesome. Thanks, Andrew and Andrew, as Ryan commercial operations brings a kind of the go to mar market perspective. So we thought Jeff and Andrew were kind of like a perfect pair to help walk us through this topic. I myself, I'm Chief Revenue Officer of acuity, MD. Acute, MD is a commercial intelligence platform that can kind of power your entire commercial operations all the way from market sizing down through forecasting and ideally helping with valuation exit. So we're gonna talk more about the topics that we kind of outlined at the beginning. But here are the areas we wanted to to dive into, sort of four main stages of how you go through commercial commercialization of an organization and then to either sustainable business model or exit to a strategic or or whatever your path may be, but their innovation and how do you come up with your products? Is the room is ideally full of innovators, and you all are the experts in that space. So we'll come at it from the perspective of what are some of the things you need to think about at the end of the journey, while you're innovating next, assessing your market size. Have to make sure that we've got a largest Mar, a large enough market size to capture the quality of the revenue that you're going to go after. So really, what are the tools you're using, and how are you assessing your ability that the endpoint of your commercialization effort? Once you've identified how big and you've got your product, then what is your go to market? How are you actually going to operationalize your opportunity, and ultimately, are you going to run a sustainable business? Are you going to exit to a strategic it's fine. You still have to prove predictability, sustainability, possibly profitability, maybe. But you've really got to get into the Sustainable Business category in order to achieve your goals, exit valuation, things like that. So we're going to dive into these categories, these stages. Thank you all for the late comers. I said at the beginning, go ahead and ask questions during these particular topics. We think a conversation would be a lot more interesting than just kind of diatribing and waiting until the end. So we're. We will start on pushing the right button. So we'll, we'll start on, we'll start on innovation. So we're not going to read the slide. You all can read that. They're more intended to be a backdrop. But let's start with Jeff. Jeff, what are some of the, what are some of the founder considerations around innovation as you're thinking about the ends in beginning with the ends in mind, and like as you consider your exit strategy, what are some of the things founders and innovative innovators need to keep in mind?

Jeff Byrne  5:32  
Yeah. So I think as you're as you're thinking you have longer term and you have, you have the solution that you're excited to bring forward to patients, I think you want to be, you know, sort of conscious of, you know, the different phases that will go through. And as you commercialize and drive forward, what's the investment that's going to be required, specifically, what's the, what's the timeline that you're going to want to follow, and what cash and capital will that require? And then, as we will talk some more about it, but as you start to discover your Tam and understand the nuances you know, how are those things going to play together, and what's your what's your strategy look like? And start to form assumptions that you can then begin the test. And as you're thinking through, you know, what's the what's the timeline, what's the capital, what's the structure, and major assumptions, you start thinking about those things early, so that you can more more quickly, see where you're right and see where you need to adjust as you're you know, as you're walking down that path. Yeah,

Alex Wakefield  6:27  
great. Any Andrew, from your perspective, any stories of good or bad

Andrew Morris  6:31  
in your past? Always stories. But I think just to maybe level set the room, how many in the room are? Are pre commercial or commercial? How about pre commercial? Sure. Not quite, quite a bit. And then obviously everybody else is commercial. I'm assuming anybody in that early innovation phase of sort of proving your innovation? Anybody couple hands, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think for me, the innovation piece is interesting, Jeff. Jeff hit into it on sort of, where are you in your career? What problem are you trying to solve? I mean, these things matter, right? If it's, you know, my early in my career, coming from the sports world, if I, if I see an opportunity, you know, to enhance ACL repairs, and I can develop a technology quickly, I can get that to market very quickly. And so within the time span of a few years, I can get something validated and to market. I'm not creating a new category, but if your innovation is something truly groundbreaking, that's going to take time, and that's going to take education, and you really have to look at, do I have the time and energy and bandwidth, and where am I with my my family? And do I have the resources, and do I have the people that come along with me on this journey? Because this could be a 15 to 20 year education process, and so when you're looking at that early innovation, you really have to take those other things into consideration, other than I found a problem and I have a really cool solution. What's it actually going to take to commercialize? Because we know that that's where a lot of the struggle happens.

Alex Wakefield  8:00  
Anything else from your perspective? Jeff on helping founders innovators guide themselves to the right decision making path of how you want to assess the innovations,

Jeff Byrne  8:11  
I think it's really, you know, understanding your solution and then understanding the market. And you know, as early as you can start to, you know, access market data and find the find the right tool to start understanding what your targets will look like and start thinking through those profiles. Yeah,

Alex Wakefield  8:27  
great. I mean, there, the med tech industry is certainly akin to the software industry, where it's got to be a little bit more than people are buying really cool technology. They got to buy sustainable business and understand that there's some sort of business behind the innovation. So focusing on the focusing on the

Andrew Morris  8:44  
business. I'll add one more comment just in to give acuity a nod, because, after all, acuity did put this, this presentation on but what we have today is really good data. So if it's, you know, a program or service like acuity, when you're looking at that early innovation, we can start to understand, I think every innovator in the room probably would say it's a huge problem and we have to solve it. And that's what kind of we used to have to go off of a lot of anecdotes and tribal knowledge, and we think it's a big problem. Now we can definitively get the data. Okay. Is it a big problem? By the coding, by the procedures? How often is this problem happening? And then you can start to build out from there. We didn't have that, or at least good data in the past. So that's a really powerful tool to kind of get you

Jeff Byrne  9:30  
on the right start. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And I think if you you know, if you take that time early to really find the right experts who can interpret the data for you and bring it and bring it to you early, it's going to save you so much time. Which is, which is really important? 

Alex Wakefield  9:43  
Yeah. Excellent, yeah, good. Question. Go ahead. 

Audience Question  9:46  
Little bullet point will customers pay for it? Can you expand a little bit on the backs and what's unique, because customers catch all CD, you know what I mean? Yeah,

Alex Wakefield  9:55  
yeah. Question. Question, just to repeat it on product fit, is, Will customer. Pay for the product. 

Andrew Morris  10:01  
I'm happy to take it. I think we'll probably jump into this topic a bit more on the next, kind of two topics. But I care a lot about product positioning and market positioning, and that's that's kind of part of that is who is our customer. I think that's kind of what you're alluding to, who actually is our customer, who's our ideal customer profile, you can sort to start to go down all of these paths, but if you have that wrong from the start, that sort of sets off a cascade of negative impacts to really your whole commercial plan. So that's really incredibly important to understand, who are we going after, what is the exact problem, and can they pay for it? Not only can they pay for it, but will they pay for it at a level that's actually a profitable business margin? We have to answer those questions up front or you're in trouble. Thanks for the

Alex Wakefield  10:50  
question. I actually forwarded to the to the to the TAM slide, and it's a good lead in so this is Jeff, this is your sweet spot. And how are we doing the financial analysis of the market, but maybe, maybe things beyond, like Andrew, you explain like part of our solution is, is bringing all of the underlying data, the procedural data. So in addition to just kind of looking at raw data and procedural data, what are some of the other considerations you need to think about when you're looking at relative relevant Tam and what making sure you're going after the right things, yes,

Jeff Byrne  11:23  
yes. I think obviously you'll start with the procedure counts, right? And then I think there are quite a few things that you want to dig into beyond just how often is this, you know, solution, you know, possibly helpful. I think you really want to look look more deeply, understand are there, you know, concentrations within surgeons. You know what? Why is that? You know, how would you approach those, those targets, and then look for other other important metrics that you would track in the future, and other things that you think are relevant. So if you I guess, an example we we had at art alone was, we looked across, you know, a certain set of CPT codes, and we got specific to look and say, Okay, if there are these modifiers, or if these, these other indications that you go alongside, what does that mean, and how will that affect our sales process? And how do we, you know, plan to target these surgeons? And then there are other fields you can look at, acuity indeed, does a really nice job of tracking fellowships and tracking interactions through publications. So you can start to look through, you know, look through that level of data to understand, Okay, how are these targets tied together? How can we be efficient in our medical education, you know, as we go down the revenue path and really sort of digest the TAM as you see it, and segment it, and understand what would our strategy be? And, you know, a lot of times comes back to time of, okay, there are this many targets. We've got one sales guy now, or we've got three sales guys now. How would we approach these targets? And then start to get really, really detailed around, you know, what are our plans to address this Tam? And you start to start to track your assumptions, you know, put put in, put into place processes to monitor what is your progress, and how are you discovering these targets and, you know, interacting with them. Yeah, I think it

Alex Wakefield  13:14  
was maybe two years ago. We met at double A LS or something like that. You guys were going for a round, that's right. Maybe talk about, like, this is sort of the stage in the stage in the journey when you think about, how am I going to raise money? How am I going to accurately calculate Tam? What am I going to represent to my investors and go pitch for funding? How do you, how do you think about that? Or how did you use the solution to, kind

Jeff Byrne  13:32  
of, yeah, and I think it's a balancing act, because, you know, you take this Tam, you've got 10,000 10,000 surgeons, right? And you, as you go through, you look and, okay, well, there's 1000 that you really that really matter, that you want to go after. So you need to sort of balance the big tam number and, you know, the higher number that people are looking for. But I've also found that a lot of the VCs will really value if you're able to articulate your understanding of the market, and, you know, ideally have a few customers and have the data to back it up and say, Hey, here's our Tam, you know, we sort of see this as the adoption over time. But then get really specific around, you know, Hey, these are the 1000 we've identified. This is our med ed program. And be able to articulate your plan, as opposed to, you know, everybody's got a 2 billion, $3 billion Tam, yeah, right. It's much more important to say, Okay, we did 500k last year. And this is why there's, you know, a credible plan to 2 million, 4 million, or whatever your plans are. So I think the more specific you can be, and the more you can tie that history to what you're seeing in your tam will really help with those VC discussions and just become the expert in, you know, in the coding and in the you know, the nuances of that, that market you're pursuing Good, well, good experience at art alone, good success.

Alex Wakefield  14:47  
Andrew, what about, from your perspective? We think about Tim. We talked earlier was not just Tam, but Sam and Salman. How do you drill down to, what Tim should you actually be going after? Yeah,

Andrew Morris  14:56  
lots of different terms. We could, we could not go in. Two, because everybody would glaze over, but it is real. So we talk about having your Tam, and everybody in the room who's done a pitch today or heard a pitch today has heard somebody's Tam, and it's probably ends in a B or has lots of zeros. And are they real? I mean, yes, there's probably some justification on all of them, but how authentically attainable? Are they? So when I'm looking at this, yes, the TAM has to be justifiable, and they're going to be big based on what you've solved. And then what is my actual serviceable market? So who can I actually go get based on the resources I have, the timeline, I have all of those things we talked about already, so having that authentically detail that is really important, and then drilling down a level further, who can I go get this year? So really realistic on that this goes again, back to positioning, and who's my ideal customer profile, profile. Who can I go get right now, this year? What's that expectation? If we can articulate our metrics to investors in that way, and then do what we say we're gonna do that's much more powerful than look at how big my tam is. Great.

Alex Wakefield  16:07  
All right, we'll keep moving. No questions on that topic. So let's move into the go to market. So one of the things we talked about before we came up here was, rather than just kind of pontificating and doing Q and A is hopefully give some actionable guidance on here are some good things that we've seen be successful in the past. So Andrew is as the commercial head of commercial at at Mayo one. And you're thinking about go to market. Maybe some you know, good stories, not good stories, areas of improvement. But what are some of the things you think about when you're when you're going to market in this phase and starting to operationalize a lot of the analysis,

Andrew Morris  16:44  
yeah, lots of things. I think the, I think, I think the first thing up here is parallels and early adopters. Let's, let's take a moment to just talk about that. Everybody in the room knows what they are. Key opinion leaders, right? And a lot of people don't even like to use KOLs. But it's so critically important. This is such an important part of every company's journey, is who is that early team that you're going to work with? And I think it can be a trap for companies that either aren't familiar with the market that they're going to if you're an international company coming to the US or vice versa, who are the key opinion leaders? Because it's pretty easy to fall down the road of working with people that that maybe can hurt your reputation, or maybe are on a lot of different payrolls, or maybe don't fit the ICP that you should have outlined very clearly in your positioning. So it really matters who are my KOLs, who are my early adopters? That sends a massive signal to the market about your product? Is it quality? Is it scalable, or is this just a pay for play, kind of a product that that will get a quick acquire, and then it'll be gone. It really, really matters. And so how do you get that knowledge? Well, we used to rely on tribal knowledge, right? So you go find someone like me, and do you know this guy? Do they know this guy? How good are they in the or and you kind of do this song and dance, which is really difficult if you don't intimately know the procedures or the solution that you're that you're involved in. But now we have data, so for our company now, when I, when I joined the company, we did an assessment on a specialty that I didn't have experience in and we looked at the KOLs. We said, Do they do? They fit these profiles, right? And I can, I can look in acuity, another plug, and I can see, okay, what's their education? We can all look at that. But who is their peer network? How many of these procedures did they did? Who's paying these surgeons? So I know every company that they're doing consulting for. I know their peer network. I know every single one of their publications, and I can look at that in five minutes. That gives me a very good idea of is this somebody that really wants to solve my problem, or is this just somebody that's looking for another deal?

Alex Wakefield  18:54  
Yeah, and I think if we get to at the end, we've got a final slide just on the company. We wanted to focus a little bit more on real world examples and advice. But when you think about tying all of the data together and the upstream analysis, and then really a lot of data around KOLs and the partnerships you talk about, I mean, how helpful operationally is that to just have in one platform and just seamlessly manage the business? To some

Andrew Morris  19:17  
degree, it's incredibly helpful. I mean, we're very fortunate in our in our current company, that we actually, we don't have anybody on the payroll, and that was a conscious decision to be able to signal that out to the market. Right now, we're now, we're starting to now go and build some very strategic partnerships, but it's incredibly helpful. It what, what used to take time and bandwidth, and you have to make phone calls and you've got to sit and do your Google search. It's just a waste of time. We're just talking about efficiency here to get to the data that you need. So for me, it's incredibly helpful. Yeah,

Alex Wakefield  19:49  
great. And then Jeff, from your perspective, I know we talk about, like, All right, we've got the first 10 million in revenue in the bank. How do we assess that? How do we break that down? Was that good revenue? Where do we double down? Down and continue to go to market. Any thoughts around assessing kind of first success and then growing from there? Yeah, I

Jeff Byrne  20:06  
think it's, you know, that's the, you know, the the exciting part. There are a lot of things that I've seen done, done well or done poorly, that you want to think about that, that second month of revenue, you know, the invoices start coming in, and you start to get the, get the revenue data. Just, you know, it's exciting in your small team, or you're ramping and I think the more more quickly you can sort of tie your tie, your big picture assumptions, or your, you know, your, what's your, what's your revenue story, or what's, you know, what are the, some of the key things we talked about before, and start to make sure you're, you're really doing a good job of getting that information into your revenue system, you know, you know, I guess you know. Again, for the using the Ardalan example, you know, who is the surgeon, what's the indication? You know, where some of the key fields, but you know, look through, look through, what's your model, and what do you, you know, what do you think it's going to take to get the success? And what are those metrics that you're tracking? And then understand, you know, how are those? You know, how are those reflect in the specific revenue data. And then the other piece, you know, where you really want to start to think about sort of forecasting, seeing that future revenue, you know, book it in historically. But then, you know, very early, start to think about, okay, what's my medical education strategy that I'm currently executing? And then how am I tracking that against, you know, current future revenues, to start to get an understanding of what's happening, because then, as you go down the road and you start to have those VC discussions, or you start to talk with acquirers, you want to be able to tell that story, and you want to have an understanding of your of your revenue data, and if it's clean from the beginning, or if it's, you know, clean, you know, today, when you start to really focus on it, it really pays those dividends. When you're, you know, when you're in those discussions, and you're, you talk about, hey, this is how I segmented my customers. This was, this is what matters. This is how we took our, you know, our med Ed strategy to drive this adoption, and sort of saw these factors. And you can be that expert, and you have good, clean, really robust data. Obviously you need a sales expert who can bring the, bring the revenue data in to talk about. But you know, having that, you know that clean data set and that, that understanding I found, is super helpful,

Andrew Morris  22:11  
I'll jump on So Jeff, hit a couple things there. Clean revenue, I think all the experienced people in the room, this is, you'll know all this stuff on certain but if there's anybody that's that's not as experienced, I'll just mention it. So you know what is clean revenue, right? Revenues, revenues, revenue. It's good revenue. We all want to drive top line. That's that's fine. We all, we all think we want to do that. We all want to impress investors. Would look at my growth curve and look, look at my revenue, but how much of that revenue is coming from your KOLs back to KOLs. So let's discount that out now. Now, what's your revenue look like? You know, look at things like that. How much of that revenue is coming from same stores? So back to the TAM. Is it 100 surgeons that did two procedures? Or is it two that did 100 right? Well, now, like now, I can expand that to increase my target or total attainable market. So good, clean revenue, like understanding those specific nuances of what that means is really, again, important.

Alex Wakefield  23:06  
Yeah, absolutely. All right, great examples. We will keep moving on and we get into sustainable business. So now we're trying to make sure that our company, we have a business model sustainable we can go in the exit direction that we want to. But yeah, Andrew, I don't know if you have any stories around go to market strategy, sort of resetting the strategy, and now you're, you know, rebuild the platform and kind of assess if you've made some mistakes in the past, and then, you know, building a sustainable model moving forward.

Andrew Morris  23:36  
Yeah, certainly. I think I've had a few different experiences with kind of resetting strategies and looking at commercial alignment. I think it's it is important I keep mentioning that the positioning from the beginning can have that cascade of negative effects. And it really, really can. The biggest thing is when you stick to it, because that's what you decided on, right? So we, we position something as as this, then we went to market. We didn't really understand our customer. We're just not everyone's sitting there. Why aren't we getting the sales we want? Why aren't people adopting this? We know it's so good, and maybe you're describing it the wrong way, or maybe you're positioning it the wrong way, and people just don't get it right. That's usually a good indicator that something's wrong with your messaging, or could be the product, but something could be wrong with your messaging, something could be wrong with your targeting, or something's wrong with your sales force, and in the worst case, there can be something wrong with all of them, in which case you have to start over. And if you have the capital and the time to do that, you can do that. So if you recognize it quickly, and I can't believe we've gone this far, and I haven't mentioned people. You can have all the data in the world. If you don't have the right people on the team, you're going to struggle. And that's another that's another problem. So get the right people on the bus. We could all read the same book and have 1800 different interpretations, right? So data is the same way. How do we interpret the data? Get the right people? But. And that's exactly what we've done recently. So so really, we've we've realized that a platform, technology that that we have now, we really had to base our entire commercial focus around education. It's not a relationship sell, it's not a ground and pound sell, it's not a scale your sales force. Sell. It is how do we educate the most effectively? So we have to build everything in our organization that way. Our internal employees have to have equity. Our education team has to be robust. They have to be clinical experts, so that we get them out of out of clinical practice. You have to, again, align all of these things, and it's really helpful with data to go after the right the right market. So that's been a really fun exercise, and we're seeing the payoff,

Alex Wakefield  25:43  
awesome. And then Jeff, from your perspective, maybe anything you can share about ultimately preparing Ardalan for the acquisition, the sale. But as you're thinking about sustainable business, how did you go through the process of sort of packaging it up? Or how do you how do you think about, all right, we're ready to move on. We're ready to start looking at the sale of the business, and maybe some some examples.

Jeff Byrne  26:05  
Yeah. So maybe I'll start with a little bit more general of a sort of set of the new challenges you arrive at as you scale your revenue, and then how that plays into, you know, ultimately, the decision of, do you sell the business, or what do you what do you do? And then talk through that, that piece second. So I think, for me, as we're looking at this piece, you're scaling your revenue, and you're faced with a whole new set of challenges. You've been growing, and you're enjoying that good growth, but then you've got, you know, you've got a lot of decisions to make, and new challenges, right? Continued growth becomes more more and more expensive. And then there are different inflection points that you need to start thinking through. So I think, as you know, as Andrew, and we've mentioned throughout, you know, the more data you have in history where you can, sort of, you can see what you know, what has been effective and what hasn't, and understanding, what is my revenue mix? Is this what we thought it was going to be? Is it different? Where are the opportunities to grow forward and refine our focus, or change our focus, or hopefully maintain the the focus you've started with, if you have good revenue data and good metrics and processes that have allowed you to track how have I gotten here, and why are we here? And then, you know, I think just about any business I've ever been at, there's, there's a subset of customers that are the most important to understand. So it's having the data here that now we're at scale, and now we've got a lot of customers. How do we make sure we're focused on the right ones? How do we, you know, help you know Andrew, or our sales leader, have the mechanism to to pursue those, those right, those right customers. And I think you know you're gonna have challenges. You need to raise cash, or, you know, you may have the opportunity to sell the business. And you know this is, you know when, when all that revenue data becomes so valuable, the acquire or the or the potential investor will look and want to see the revenue data. And isn't, you know, is it all? Is it all? KOLs? Is it, you know, clean? Is it quality? If you're able to tell that story of, here's our process. Here we're onboarding new new doctors, and then, depending on the profile of your acquire they're going to be looking for a certain set of values. Are they going to take this product and move it to their sales force? And is their sales force be able to do the same thing? Or are they going to use the use the product in a different way? The answers to those questions are going to be within the revenue data. And I think if you've been diligent over the years and tracking customers, taking those MPIs and matching them to your, you know, to your to your revenue data, and then using acute EMD would be the obvious choice to track and see what's my penetration. Why is it working? And we had one example. We had a doctor who was, you know, super high volume, one of our top customers doing great. And then, you know, q4 we were tracking it every quarter. And q4 is volume dropped in half. Like, what's, what's going on? You know, he came up in the the the procedure we had, and we flagged it and looked at it and said, what's, you know, what happened? Why is, you know? Why is this, you know? Why are we seeing this with the customer. And then this, the is the data refresh. That was procedure volume, right? That that surgeon saw a real drop in revenue. And if you, if you can't marry that up, you're not able to tell the story. And then, you know, there's, it's good to be able to understand that, that progression of, does the doc not like the product because he moved to something else? Is there, you know, friction with the sales agent, and then, most importantly, what's that procedure volume, and how are we doing, doing against these, these targets? So I think that's, that's the exciting part, where you can take all this work and continue to refine it, and then you'll be able to really present that value to operate the business, or to, you know, to attract somebody on the outside to the value you've created.

Alex Wakefield  29:41  
Yeah. Yeah, great. You got something Andrew?

Andrew Morris  29:43  
yeah, I just, well, I know we'll get to, hopefully, some questions here, but the sustainability piece, what is a sustainable business? I mean, the same questions you have to ask up front, on your positioning and everything you sort of ask, have to answer the questions at the end as well, because a lot of these decisions that we're making along are to get to that exit. Right? Or what is a sustainable business for you, it's not the same for everybody, right? If my goal is not to become the largest x y company, and I want to surpass a billion dollars, so I want to get to the, you know, close to 0% of companies that you have to make different decisions along becoming a strategic business, then I'm trying to get to 10 million. So, okay, I want to get to the half percent of startups, and I want to become acquired very different decisions along the path. It also has a massive impact on your commercial team. So if the founder isn't clear on what a strategic a sustainable business is and what the exit plan is, your commercial teams get a flounder, because how can they target appropriately? How can you actually build a strategic plan if you don't have a strategic exit, or at least some sort of a long term outlook? So I think a position up front define what your long term or your exit is, and then you kind of have to blend it all together. Because if you make a mistake here at trickles, and if you don't know what this is, then it then it has the same trickle effect of negativity.

Alex Wakefield  31:03  
Yeah, great. So I'm gonna go forward to second to last slide here, just sort of as a backdrop. So we're happy to take questions. I'm gonna have one more slide at the end, just a little bit about acuity. MD, but I think one more question for you guys, just from my perspective, Maya one runs their commercial operation today, like we talked about tam through pipeline stage management and acute MD, and then then we helped ardelon with kind of the commercial tech stack. But how do you think about sort of having your commercial tech stack in order as you're growing into sustainable and possible exit? How helpful is that to kind of building the business and presenting it and running it? I

Andrew Morris  31:40  
mean, for us, it's it's really important. So the first thing I did, and this is not because we're on this stage, maybe that's why I asked me, but the first thing I did when I joined mile one was, bring on acuity, because we did have all of these questions that we're actually talking about today. What's our Tam, who's our target market? All these things, and now, with some of the tools that they've, they've they've implemented, we've really ingested all of our sales data. We have our sales team working into the pipeline. So when I'm going out here, and I will this afternoon, to meet with an investor for our our series B raise, I can open up acuity, and I can show them. Here's my Tam. Here are the specific names with CPT codes that make up that Tam. Here's how much of that market we've captured to date. Here's our penetration rate, of course. Here's our pipeline with regions, with the sales team built around them. I can really outlay the entire picture so it just removes all of that ambiguity. And let's be honest, in the room for everybody, it's easier for me, right? If we can get everybody actually using the platform, then I don't have to spend hours building slide decks and pulling data from different sources and getting my CFO on the line and getting somebody else. It's just is so much easier. So yes, plug for them, but we actually use it. There's a reason why.

Jeff Byrne  32:58  
Yeah, for me, the real key curious and keep it as simple as you can and still be able to get the, you know, get the sales data to your sales leader on a daily basis. And then, you know, we found that acuity MD was really, really helpful to plug in that sales data. And, you know, it doesn't necessarily have to be a connection. You can just port it over periodically, but just define the way you're going to do it and have your schedule and just get that data refreshed on the schedule you define that. It's gonna be helpful for your

Alex Wakefield  33:26  
stage. Great. So if there are any questions for Andrew or Jeff, if you're so bold as to use the mic, feel free. Otherwise, I'll shout it out and repeat,

Audience Question 2  33:35  
Hey. My name is Patrick. I'm with a young startup in early cancer detection, and have a question about how to get key opinion leaders on board if you're a small company and have just like, gather the first clinical data, and what kind of the best approach is?

Jeff Byrne  33:53  
You want to take that? 

Andrew Morris  33:52  
I mean, I think you really have to start to become an expert in your in the problem you're solving, right? And you do that if you literally were taking the lens of, I don't know anybody in this industry, which is usually rare, but if that's the case, then you need to go find someone, right? You have to go to the industry specific meetings, start looking at who's on faculty, start networking with the programs. I mean, that's ground and pound diligence that you'd have to do. And even then, you got to push further and further and further that that's where you can fall into the trap, right of who's the right Kol, who's not the right Kol? I think there's a there's a lot of, I don't know, how do I go into this? There's a lot of ways to kind of validate that are maybe old school networking type stuff, but you just have to do it. There's no, there's no silver bullet. But if you can start from a position of the data. That's certainly going to help you

Audience Question 2  34:42  
And how to bring them on board. 

Andrew Morris  34:42  
What incentives? So that's going to depend on your business strategy, right? So you can, you, can you give them equity? Sure you can build a scientific advisory board or medical advisory board. I think probably everybody in the room has done something like that. You can certainly do that. You can compensate them for their. Time with cash or equity, as long as it's all compliant, you can, you can do those things, and they're done every day, but that's your decision. If you want, don't want surgeons on your cap table, then you compensate them for their

Alex Wakefield  35:11  
time. Yeah, I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna add one thing to add answer. There are we I presented earlier, and we have over 30 customers in our ecosystem that are pre commercial customers. And then we have, like, like the guys mentioned, a robust profile of any of the surgeons or physicians you're going to go after based on MPI. And we can surface all that in the application. We actually can surface it via AI as well. Just kind of click on the AI bot, and it gives you all sorts of things relevant to the physician that might help you give strategic ways to position your your company. Go ahead. 

Audience Question 3  35:43  
Hey, Jeff. I'm John. I have a question for you on art alone, just so you with the 12x exit to striker. What was the path? How did that look in terms of getting on strikers radar, and did you have other players in the mix? And then, how did you get to that 12x number, ultimately, and, and how involved were you in the negotiations, on, on getting there?

Jeff Byrne  36:10  
So I can answer one part of that question, and it was really great, revenue data, and having that, having that track record of the show, hey, here's the penetration, here's the here's the doctors, you know. And again, Stryker and Ardalan are both pretty, you know, intimately familiar with the space of here are the physicians that matter the most. Here's the progress we're seeing. And show that progression. And then, yeah, there was the session earlier this morning where they may have talked on this, but, you know, I suspect Adam and the team at Stryker were able to take that data and look forward and arrive at the the position they you know, they thought made sense.

Audience Question 3  36:48  
And did they come to you looking for you? Stryker, 

Jeff Byrne  36:52  
yes, yeah. 

Alex Wakefield  36:53  
All right, thanks for the questions. Let me just wrap up for a couple of minutes. First of all, thank you all for the time. Thanks for hanging in there, and the content these guys presented is fantastic. And Anders earlier in the journey at Mayo, and Jeff has recently finished with the journey and looking for a new one. But we appreciate their time. So one thing we did not mention, obviously, we didn't talk a lot about acuity, MD, but it's important to understand all of the things we talked about, save for some of the innovation that's in your hands. Be creative. You know the space best, but all the way upstream, through defining your market size based on industry data, defining your market size, figuring out where you might want to launch your product first, optimally designing your territories, where you're going to go sell, your team's going to go sell. Ultimately, when you build a team, all of those pre go to market things available in the platform. And I mentioned that, yeah, we have over 30 customers that are pre commercial. We have 200 plus that are less than 50 million in revenue. We also have six of the top 10 global med tech companies as customers. It's the same platform. It's completely cloud based and scalable on your phone, on your laptop. It's a total SaaS solution, so hyper scalable. And then as you go to as you go to market. We're not doing a demo here, but we have some folks in the room. We have a kind of a booth downstairs. We'd be happy to show you a demo just what targeting looks like once you align your products to your relevant procedure codes and align to your territory, so that it prioritizes who you should be going after first and where your most your best opportunities are to go sell your products. There's other things along the product we talk about, but we do flow all the way into customizable definitions of sales, stage sales, stage management, more accurate forecasting and ultimately building your business into a sustainable model that you can exit. So really, the entire commercial ecosystem is where we partner with our customers. So that is the acuity. MD, plug, but thank you again for your time. Thanks to Jeff and Andrew for their time and attending. I'm sure they'd be happy to answer more questions afterwards, and they got a bunch of a bunch of meetings, but thanks a lot, guys, for your time. Appreciate all you. 

Andrew Morris  39:04  
Thank you.