Medtech Talk
Medtech Talk
Episode: 202 - Navigating the Investment World with Kate Garrett and Deborah Kilpatrick
How do you evaluate investments and risks? Kate Garret, managing partner at Sonder, and Deborah Kilpatrick, partner at Sonder, share their insights and experiences as entrepreneurs, CEOs, and investors in this episode of Medtech Talk, hosted by Swaril Mathur. They deep dive into the practical realities of entrepreneurship, including the importance of networking, knowing when to keep pushing or pull out of an investment, making hard decisions, and how to conduct a successful shutdown. Garret and Kilpatrick also discuss their mentorship programs and offer advice for aspiring innovators on how to break into the industry.
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Welcome to MedTech Talk. I'm your host, Swaril Mathur. I'm so pleased today to be joined by Deb Kilpatrick and Kate Garrett of Sonder Capital. Deb and Kate are both operators-turned investors with decades of experience innovating in Health Tech. Deb started her career at Guidance, went on to become the CEO of Evidation Health, and has served on many boards and in many advisory roles before joining Sonder Capital. Kate started her career in engineering and strategic marketing roles before founding SEAL Medical out of the Stanford Biodesign Fellowship, a company that her and her co-founder built and sold to BioAir Medical. Kate is a co-founder and managing director of Sonder Capital. Deb, Kate, it is a pleasure to have you here. Welcome to the podcast.
Kate Garrett:Thanks for having us, Swaril.
Deborah Kilpatrick:Yeah, this is gonna be fun. Let's do it.
Swaril Mathur:All right. Well, I would love to start by talking about both of your career backgrounds. You both kind of share these roots of having started off as engineers, made the transition into operating roles, and really, you know, both being CEOs, and now you find yourselves in in venture. And so I would love to hear about some of those transitions and maybe what was hard along the way. And so Kate, maybe we'll start with you. Can you tell us a little bit about your leaps from engineer to entrepreneur to investor, things that surprised you along the way and whether there were other paths that you considered?
Kate Garrett:Yes. So I started as a, I'm a mechanical engineer by training and started as a very classic RD engineer in the healthcare space. I spent most of my days in the lab running side-by-side bench testing, SOLIDWORKS modeling, um, down in the clean room, building product. I was an engineer's engineer. And after doing that for about five years, I got one, I felt like I could do the V and V cycle in my sleep and then my learning trajectory had tapered. And two, I was getting um confused and and to some extent frustrated by what I saw as rapidly changing priorities for the RD team without any visibility to why we were making those changes, right? Why was a product of a certain size or length mission critical on this day? And then 90 days later, you know, all of a sudden we'd pivot from that project to something else. And I really wanted to understand what does the customer need? What are we, how do you make product line decisions? And it was with that intention that I found the Stanford Biodesign Fellowship. And why I went there was really to understand the earliest stage of innovation. How do you identify an unmet need? How do you know what that solution has to look like in order to solve the customer's patient's problem? And so it was through that journey that we ended up, Dan Azagury, who was one of the fellows with me that year, and I founded a company in the ventilator-acquired pneumonia space, trying to develop a new solution to prevent that very common infection in the ICU. And I ran that company as CEO from Inception to Exit. That was a pretty big leap going from an individual contributor role prior to biodesign to running the company as CEO in a number of ways, both just visibility to different aspects of the business. I hadn't I'd been involved with the marketing and regulatory and clinical teams as a partner on the RD side, but had never had to run those sides of the business.
Kate Garrett:And two, we we talked about this, Swaril. You know, when you go from an individual contributor role into a leadership role, the what you need to do in that role changes a lot, right? As an individual contributor, you collect data, you bring data to the group to make a decision collectively, or so that a leader can drive a decision. When you're the CEO or a leader in an organization, you really have to look at the data, you have to make a recommendation and influence and kind of get collective buy-in to going down a certain path. That was a big shift for me in my career, sort of changing my own mentality of it's not enough to collect the data. I've got to assess it, I've got to make a recommendation, I've got to stand behind that and have the conviction that this is the right path. And that is such, in from my perspective, such an important part of being a leader. And it was a major transition for me. After selling that business, I ended up moving into venture capital, which was not a planned transition, but was a natural fit in the sense that all of my career moves have been driven by one, working in healthcare, two, working with the best people I could in terms of my who I could learn from. And three, just generally maximizing my learning curve. And Venture presented an opportunity to work with Jay Watkins and Fred Mall, who are just phenomenal leaders in our space and had been great mentors to me that I knew I could continue, you know, I admired and wanted to learn from. And then Venture is a different side of the business from being an operator. And I will say, six years in, every day I'm still learning exponentially in this role. It's lots of learnings. We'll get to that later in the podcast. But it's certainly achieved those goals for me.
Swaril Mathur:Yeah, that's uh that's an incredible journey. And and just thinking about what you said about pivoting from being an individual contributor to having to really be the decision maker. How did you make that transition? Like, did you, did you have folks you leaned on to help give you the confidence? I'm just imagining that like the the analysis paralysis could be very real in that state, especially when the stakes are so high and you're making decisions you've never had to make before. How did you move through that?
Kate Garrett:I didn't have anybody that told me that. I I remember the day that it happened. I was sitting at our, we had a uh lean or virtual model. So a lot was con I had a contract manufacturer, contract engineering, a fractional regulatory quality, et cetera. So I was sitting at our contract manufacturer who did a lot of design work for us too, with these very senior, way more senior than me. I was 27, right? These are, you know, decades of experience engineers. And I just feel like we'd been going in circles on this engineering design decision. And finally, I was just like, you know, we have to have this product and patience by the end of the year. I am done. We have to make a decision. And I just sort of realized in that moment, in the context of if I want to be successful, you know, I raised money. We gave a certain timeline. It kind of just hit me in that moment that we are gonna go in circles forever. If we, if somebody doesn't step up and say, this is what we're doing.
Kate Garrett:And I just realized that's my job. These people gave me money to do this. I need to make this decision and we just need to go. And I remember standing up, going to the whiteboard and saying, circling the path and saying, This is what we're gonna do. Now let's build out our Gantt chart and let's go. And everybody was excited and agreed, and you know, we went with it. But it was just this moment that I realized if I don't do this, nobody else is going to, and we aren't gonna be successful. So I need to do it. And yeah, it was easy after that. Like everything in life, it comes, you build a muscle, you you practice, it's scary, it's hard, you do it enough, it's not scary, it's not hard, it comes naturally. Leadership is a practiced muscle, in my experience.
Swaril Mathur:And that in that specific muscle of having to make hard decisions often quickly and often with imperfect information seems like one that you might use occasionally in your role in VC, just from time to time. Awesome. Great. Well, Deb, similarly, you've shared some of those steps on the pathway in terms of starting off in engineering and and holding many leadership roles. Kind of walk us through your journey as well and what what some of the major uh learning points were for you.
Deborah Kilpatrick:Yeah, the the thing that I think about in my career in the context of the question you're asking, Squirrel, is you know, this moment where I I had been an engineer doing engineering and I became an engineer doing other things. Um and that pivotal moment for me came at Guidant Corporation. There's no there's no question about it. And a couple of things were sort of really important in that in that um transition for me. One, they gave me the chance. Um, you know, Guident, you know, is often known as sort of the university of medical devices back in that time. And um, we had incredible talent, but we also had incredible talent development programs inside Guident. And you were in deeply encouraged to rotate it around and do lots of different things. And so it was the first place where anybody had kind of put the idea in my head that as an engineer, I could do other things beyond engineering in an engineering way, right? Like an engineering mindset and with a very structured kind of systems engineering kind of thought process, which is definitely the main way my brain works. And um, and I I look back on that as a really incredibly important moment for me. I realized I didn't have to be the person inventing the things anymore. Um, but maybe my my real contribution was going to be helping other people's inventions get commercialized, you know, whether it's building a product around a technology or building a company around a product or, you know, many different ways to think about it, but it definitely happened there. Um when guidance was acquired, um, because I had been uh helping to run the internal incubation programs, uh, my responsibility was on the vascular business side of that. Um, I had a lot of ideas. I was very open about what I might go and do. Uh, one of them was to stay at what was then Abbott Vascular, uh, one was to go to different startups uh of many different kinds. Um, and one was to to go to uh Kleiner Perkins and work with them on a company that was gonna focus in uh messenger RNA-based diagnostics for cardiovascular disease, which I had no idea how to do because the role that I was going to, the role that I was going to do there was going to be sales and marketing and reimbursement, which I had never sold, marketed, or reimbursed anything or gotten reimbursement for anything. But I was very, very confident that I could figure it out and that I could, you know, assemble a world-class team, especially from people who I had known in the sort of guidance cardiovascular med tech diaspora and uh in Silicon Valley. And um, and that proved to be exactly the right kind of way to approach it. Um, what that experience taught me at Cardio DX was I learned how to raise money. I learned how to build and scale a company from zero to your first 10 million of revenue, your next, you know, 10 million revenue, you know, et cetera. Um, I learned how to get a national cover national coverage decision. Um, these are all things that, as I think about how we did them, I approached them very much as an engineer, but I was not engineering. And um, and so uh, you know, flash forward to to evident. And I think that in general, when Christine Lemke and I met, the idea that we could build a different kind of software and services company for the pharmatech space and in this new category of you know virtual or decentralized research was a really big idea. And we didn't know how to do it. But there again, I definitely approached it from us from the standpoint of how to do it as an as an engineering kind of mindset, um, both uh in terms of how to deal with technical complexity, but also in terms of how to build around a fairly complicated idea, right? And a fairly complicated kind of company and invent a business model around that and and all of that. And so I've always been very, very comfortable around complexity. Um, and then, you know, when eventually I was uh approached as I was, you know, planning my my transition out of Evidation, um, when Kate approached me about joining Sonder, I frankly never thought of myself as ever being in venture capital. Um, I always thought of myself as being on the other side of the table as an operator. Um, but we talked a lot about it and what they're doing here and what we are doing here now, and um why I thought or why Kate was thinking that I could be a part of that that team, this team. And and it it made sense to me the way that she described it because a lot of building, right? It's a lot of building, it's very common, you know, not being afraid of complexity, building companies around complex ideas that have very important clinical and patient impact. Um, and the ultimate goal here of uh trying to trying to change the standard of care, which is a very high bar. And if you think about it, you don't hear a lot of med tech companies or firms talk about that. Um, it is our North Star. It is what I think of as the top of the Sonder pyramid of criteria, and that has appealed to me greatly, but again, it appeals to me as an engineer wanting to build things in a really rich context of engineering, new new kinds of companies in in med tech and inpatient care. So the through line of all of that is is engineering mindset. The through line of all of that is systems thinking and being excited by complexity, not afraid of it, and all of the things around what I was doing in a given role were almost ancillary, right? Um, and and being really open to the idea that I could do different things.
Swaril Mathur:Yeah.
Deborah Kilpatrick:And here we are.
Swaril Mathur:And here we are. And it's it's such an interesting journey because it it sounds like, you know, there are there are a lot of folks out in the med tech world who started off as engineers in school, but then went into many different realms and and maybe don't actually use their engineering mentality on the day-to-day as much as you're talking about. But it sounds like in your journey, that has actually kind of been your superpower. I am so curious to if we to rewind the tape to, you know, this pivot that you made into that first role at Cardio DX. And you said, you know, you had never done sales and marketing and reimbursement before. What gave you the confidence to take that role and what gave them the confidence to offer it to you?
Deborah Kilpatrick:Well, I can't really speak for them. Um, although I will say, you know, the part Dana Mead, who had been the president of my division of Guidan prior to John Kupek, um, Dana Mead had gone to be a partner at Kleiner Perkin. So I was coming in as a known entity, right? One of the partners. So that was actually quite, I think, quite important. Um in my in my mind, and this has turned out to be a mental model or a career rubric in a way that I have talked about with many different people in mentoring people about how to think about what's next and um how to have the courage to do things that you don't know how to do or that you don't know if you can do. And for me, it's about uh my mental model, my visualization, if you will, is you know, I'm it's like when you're crossing, you're looking for a way to cross a stream, and you're just looking for rocks that you're not trying to get two feet on at one time. You're trying to get one foot on one rock very steadily at one point in time. And then you can kind of go to the next instability point, get stable and right. And for me, my career has very much been a lot of that because I tend to go do things where I know that I have a stable footing of contribution in some area and at Cardiod X. It was cardiovascular disease. My PhD had been in cardiovascular disease, I'd been at guidant for a decade, focused in cardiovascular disease. I understood the channel, I understood the segments of cardiology, I understood the disease deeply. And I I I was going there with a way to contribute immediately. What I didn't know, right, were the aspects of uh commercialization. And that program was there. What you didn't know was was how to do the job. You're yeah, it's it's true. It's it's it's totally true. But also, if you think about it from an engineering or RD standpoint, if you're doing really innovative RD, you don't know how to do the thing you're trying to do. That's the whole point. That's a really interesting framework. And so I I am not afraid of not knowing. I I I don't really, I don't really get afraid by that kind of thing. It it's just it excites me more than frightens me. And it's very motivating to me, especially if I'm motivated by the big problem, the big thing that I'm working on. That that North Star is if I've got passion about that, I will figure out the rest. And it's not hubris, by the way. I really am not a person with a lot of hubris at all. Hubris is confidence with no data. And so I've learned like I actually can do things. And if you really go back to like ground zero of this in my brain, I have to credit my parents. Like somehow they put this in my head that I could work hard and figure things out. Yeah.
Swaril Mathur:And that it's that like growth mindset, the learner's mindset, right? Yeah.
Deborah Kilpatrick:It is. And and my dad was a high school football coach, and I watched him very much have this philosophy and approach in developing, you know, young men on the football field. And um, I I I just it's seeped in somehow. And so the idea that I could figure things out, even a new role that I didn't know how to do, that's just another thing I had to go figure out. And by the way, I'm not, I'm not sort of saying that it wasn't hard. It was really hard. I had a lot to learn, but I'm also not afraid to say what I don't know. And I'm not afraid to listen to people who know way more than me. And if you can surround yourself with that kind of environment, that is a superpower, right? Because you're you're building off the collective superpowers, not just yours. And I've always, always been drawn to situations where I can pair with people with different superpowers, including this one, right? Including what I'm in right now. Like I think Kate and I have really different superpowers, and I like that. I'm drawn to that. And so Cardio DX was another version of that.
Kate Garrett:Um it's really interesting hearing your career. I mean, I know your career, Deb, but hearing you walk through it that way, you and I both share a common thread in our career jumps that arguably nobody would have given us the jobs we got if they didn't know us, right? Like when I founded CL Medical, I wasn't a CEO. Nobody would have given me a CEO job, right? And when we founded Sonder Capital, nobody would have hired me as a partner at a venture firm just looking at my resume on paper. And same for Cardio DX. Like you, you know, you were sales and marketing. But in each of these career jumps that we've done, somebody that knew us and had worked with us and believed in us was instrumental in creating that opportunity. And I think it's uh just a practical reality for the entrepreneurs and the innovators out there listening is um you have to have the courage and the willingness and the capabilities to do the things you're doing, but also be practical that often those opportunities, you either create them yourselves or they come through trusted networks. Um, I again, the only, I think the only venture firm in the world probably that would have given me the partner and then the managing partner title is a firm led by people that had worked with me, knew what I was capable of, knew I could figure out the things I didn't know, like Deb has done time and time again in her career. Um, so anyway, it's just an interesting thread that you and I both share that. Yeah.
Swaril Mathur:Yeah, absolutely. And and you know, I was joking a moment ago that it's like, oh, you you knew a bunch of stuff except how to do the job you were hired to do. But really, the reality is what could look like luck on the surface was was actually the fact that you had earned the right to that chance, right? You had earned the right to being top of mind, right? Like you were you were top of mind for Dana Mead to to tap for that role for a reason, right? Um and so I think that's fair, yeah. That's that's the key. Um, absolutely. And it's it's very first full circle for me personally here having this conversation with both of you because you both have been mentors in my career that have helped push me and and give me the tools and the resources and the courage and the connections to go into roles that I have never done before. And so you are both absolutely passing on uh passing on that torch in a big way. You're welcome, Swar. I appreciate it.
Kate Garrett:And also forward. Forward. Any organization is lucky to have you. I agree. And by the days. 100%. 100%.
Swaril Mathur:Well I loved uh Deb, I loved your articulation of, you know, the fact that you are not afraid of, you know, things that are unknown or that look messy or that that seem hard. And in fact, you were excited about that because I think that that dovetails really nicely with the fact that you guys are really early stage investors. And one of the things I really want to spend some time talking to you about is how do you how can you be an early stage investor? How do you de-risk something that is by definition at the riskiest stage of the innovation pipeline? And so just context for listeners who might not be familiar with Sonder Capital, actually maybe, maybe one of one of you wants to talk a little bit about Sonder and kind of the the investment theses and the stage at which you invest and then we can dive in.
Kate Garrett:Yeah, I'm happy to take that. So I would say Sonder Capital, we're a new venture firm on the block, though we're investing out of fun too now. Our North Star is that we are looking to back teams and technologies that are fundamentally creating a new standard of care for patients. We want to back things that are going to significantly move the needle from access, outcomes, or just the fundamental business model through which we approach this because we believe that we have to scale the access and delivery of care in a more efficient cost model than we're doing today. So that's what motivates us. We are as a firm founded by entrepreneurs and operators in the healthcare space first. This is what we've spent our careers doing. We love it. We all have patents we've all been CEOs we've all sold businesses. We've been at every single stage of the journey and what we think for this next phase of our careers that we can do uniquely well and best is join with other entrepreneurs to bring our network, our investor base to supporting a few really big ideas that are going to change the standard of care. Typically these are large you know multi-billion dollar markets again because we can only pick a few things any one time to work on. These are often first mover technologies it's the first of its kind in a category these are often what we are the theme that we're investing against is the idea that the demand for late for for healthcare delivery is going up with an increasing population, aging population at the same time our qualified physicians, nurses, PAs, technicians supply chain is going down. So we have a supply-demand curve that's crossing in ways you don't want to see. And so we're fundamentally looking for technologies that can help us change that trajectory. And there are two themes we're investing against one is medical robotics and I use that term very intentionally it's not soft tissue surgical robotics which is what intuitive is which is a subsector of medical robotics. We are looking across the continuum of care. Where can robotics enable the scalable delivery of care in often high volume, often precision based tasks. So we're investing in phlebotomy, in colonoscopy, dermatology skin checks or melanoma, just to give a few examples that's one category. The second category is minimally invasive therapies, again that are creating a new standard of care, first category making that can allow us to expand access in lower care, you know, lower acuity sites of care, lower cost in order to achieve our goal of expanding access and delivery. Deb, anything I missed?
Deborah Kilpatrick:No, I think we're trying to also swirl without regard to stage and think about the the the fact that you can invest into like really major inflection points of companies when they are still building what they are going, they're still becoming what they are going to be. And in medtech we know what those inflection points usually are right very early on pre-clinical data and IP and then you get into first inhuman and then get to your pivotal trial, regulatory submission approval first commercialization, revenue, right? So we we know what those that sequence of inflection points usually is and so I think what's what's special about Sonder, if I if I say so myself now that I've been here for over a year, I feel like I can pat Sonders self on the back a little bit. We are really seasoned operators. And so it's not just that we're deploying capital at these you know moments before an inflection. It's that we actually feel like our operational experience because we will get in there and work on it with them side by side with these founders and management teams we can have a way of de-risking going into that that inflection point right in other words maximizing that inflection point because of the operational hands-on approach that we take so that is something that Kate didn't say but I know is intrinsic in the way that we work now that I've you know sort of been here and seen it up close um that I that I really personally enjoy and I don't know if I could do it any other way having done it here.
Kate Garrett:Yeah and your questions how do we de-risk you know we see the same risks that everybody else sees with early stage. In fact we probably see more because we've been in the seat we've lived it so it's not that we can before we make the investment de-risk more you know we we see the risks we see all of them as Deb's saying we bring our experience with the team to help them manage to move through the de-risking process. What I would say we maybe do differently though is when we're assessing the risk return profile, we know what the risks are what we're looking for is a return, a reward profile from a patient impact standpoint, from a market size opportunity that warrants the risk that we all know is there. We are not going to have a hundred percent success rate at these big bold ideas. And we've already proven that we've had some but you've got to have the right ratio of risk to return from patient impact from value creation in order to start down that journey of risk.
Swaril Mathur:Yeah. And so maybe to double click on that, what are some of the things that you're thinking about when you're when you're evaluating an investment to make um you know and you're you're looking at a number of different opportunities and kind of comparing contrasting and deciding where to place your bets what are some of the things you're looking at that will tell you okay we're we're comfortable with the risk return profile here versus there.
Deborah Kilpatrick:So one of the ways that I do this um Swarel is you know I'm very I'm very much conscious of looking for the long pull in the risk tent. Like what is the what is the risk that rises so far above the other all the other risks, the plethora of risks um that if we don't solve that, it doesn't matter if we solve these other things, right? And so I'm always looking for the rate limiting risk factor in a way, right? Like and my my way in diligence of sort of tackling the question of do we think that risk is fundable? Do we think that one dominant risk is still something we can capitalize and underwrite is is multifactorial. But it often comes down to do I think there is a technical way to minimize that risk? Because I'm very comfortable with technical risk, right? Again, approaching things as a technical person engineering mindset. And two, do I think that management team andor that founder CEO has the sufficient skill to actually tackle that and in medtech so often the early stage founders are engineers, right? They are scientists or engineers or other technical people. And so it is an easy thing to try and pattern match to that or try to assess that. And having been technical people and you know had so much time in the engineering seat ourselves for so long, I feel like we're pretty good at assessing if that's a good match or not. And it's not to say that we wouldn't fund non-technical founders. That's not what I mean. I I mean more I'm I'm more responding to like what is a tactic that I use when I'm thinking about the level of risk or the type of risk that we can underwrite is there I'm looking for the the ways of justifying underwriting it by there being a spot a solution space based on the people and the nature of the problem. And to me that is that is again and it's something that I talked about earlier which is that's the way an engineer would approach it. Yeah it's very logical it's not magical.
Swaril Mathur:Yeah yeah and so said differently you're not really sizing the risk per se you're assessing the mitigation for the risk and then assessing the feasibility of implementing that mitigation and sizing that against the uh against the potential upside.
Kate Garrett:And so one thing just you know to your question of how do you pick right of all the opportunities that come through how are you force ranking I have to say it's probably every entrepreneur's and we've been it right that got the no's from the VCs of why why did you do this other deal? Why didn't you do mine? I don't understand. And I'll just, you know, for us first of all it's my least favorite part of our job is how saying no to 99.5% of people that we talked to, including many, many incredible entrepreneurs and incredible opportunities. For us, some of the things that kind of help us filter through the top of the funnel is fit with our thesis. I mean we are investing in the category broad category of medical robotics and minimally invasive therapies that has that has been evolving for us as a firm and Deb has been instrumental in helping us get to some more process and clarity on that. So that that's one big filter for us. The other is just return on capital. Again, because we're not exclusively early stage but we'll do it and it is a higher risk phase to get involved you have to have the return profile to justify it. At the end of the day if we don't make money for our limited partners we won't have the opportunity to continue to support companies to continue to help bringing these technologies to market. And so we have to solve for that side of the business and the return profile has to meet the risk profile.
Swaril Mathur:Yeah that that absolutely makes sense. Now you alluded to a little bit earlier the fact that you know you'll make your assessment right you'll weigh the risks and the benefits and the upsides and sometimes things still just won't go according to plan, right? Every every venture actually regardless of stage is going to encounter unexpected challenges you know um and so something I'm curious about is as actually both from your experience as operators but also now your experience as investors and board members, how do you tell the difference between you know when a when a challenge comes up, a headwind comes up, what how do you tell the difference between like, okay, this is just the next wall that we have to run through, but we're gonna run through it and we're gonna get through it. And maybe it'll take more time, maybe it'll take more money, but we're gonna get there versus, oh, this is the wall that tells us something about our core thesis was wrong and it is time to shut this house down. How do you distinguish between those?
Kate Garrett:Yeah we um so I think it's a great question. It's a it's an eternal question, not just for an investor, but also for an entrepreneur, right? Entrepreneurs deal with this all the time. Is this a roadblock that I have to cut go around is this a company killing thing um the same is true from an investor standpoint with with some nuances. I would say for me what I always go back to, I am an entrepreneur at heart. So I kind of bias towards that it comes back to the unmet need. Is this a still an unmet need? Is there a patient like how significant is this for patients, for the physicians that are affected? If there is still a massive unmet need and we still think we have a differentiated approach to solving it, but we've learned something about product market fit or we had a technical roadblock we've got to change or oh the FDA moved the needle for us but you know it's just this delay my perspective is that's the North Star. Is it a huge unmet need? Is the is the market demand there? Do you have a differentiated insight to approaching that and you keep going as as hard as you can for as long as you can until literally you cannot anymore. And um we will continue to support and fund companies and find ways to help them get funded to keep trying to crack that problem. It is hard. We know it we have lived the journey as entrepreneurs it is so hard and we will be there to help our CEOs try to keep going every way we can at the end of the day sometimes you just can't. You run out of money. You literally can't and then you shut it down. We've had two of those that shut down purely because of capital availability despite our best efforts we had a third that shut down because they didn't have product market fit. It wasn't an unmet you know we brought it to market we assessed they tried it the reality was the unmet need assumptions did not pan out to what we had expected and we shut the company down with no follow on capital.
Deborah Kilpatrick:So yeah one one operational um approach to the question you're asking Swarel also that comes to mind when I'm when I'm listening is you know in my discussions with uh management teams or on boards or um even in my you know not even necessarily Sonder investments but my own angel investments like when I'm or advising companies or working with different CEOs or founders, you know, there's there's two things I'm I find myself talking about a lot what in the context of what you're asking. One is uh let's let's please not uh mix up speed bumps and stop signs. Let's let's please be very conscious to not mistake a speed bump for a stop sign. Let's be everybody calm down. And two, um let's make sure that we actually are pattern matching to failure modes. Like you often hear people talk about pattern match venture is always about pattern matching to success. I actually think it's as much about pattern matching to failure modes operationally what do you mean by that? Well we've you could have commercial failure modes you could have technical failure modes clinical failure modes operational failure modes right like you have act of God failure modes that are completely disruptive to businesses that have nothing to do with the management team right like so but be this is one of the benefits I argue of working with Sonder or firms like Sonder that have operators as the partners is we have seen so many failure modes. And Kate's right it doesn't be operators doesn't mean you have the magical recipe to succeed every single time but I would argue it means that we've seen a lot of ways to tackle failure modes of various types. And that is often a critical mode of operating with companies to de-risk early on and help them out of out of out of jams. Don't mistake speed bumps and stop signs or mix them up. But aside from that right like trying to actually identify failure modes and how to handle them is really really important. And I will acknowledge that is also classic engineering mindset.
Kate Garrett:That's such a great that's such a great Deb-ism.
Swaril Mathur:Absolutely.
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Swaril Mathur:I I want to double click Kate on what you just mentioned of some of the ventures that didn't go as planned and had to shut down right this is a side of venture that everyone kind of knows exists, but it just doesn't get talked about as much because you know it's not the stuff that makes the splashy headlines but I think it's important to unpack some of the things that can happen there. And actually to your point Deb, right it's important to share the stories and what some of those learnings were of things that became insurmountable roadblocks so that other entrepreneurs can learn from learn from those tales and and try to kind of pivot earlier if at all possible. So Kate you mentioned kind of two different flavors of examples one where you know you really pressure tested the unmet need, really, really believed the unmet need was still completely valid and the solution was still the right solution and yet just couldn't get the capital to keep the company moving. So my question there is is the obvious one which is if if the unmet need is so well validated and if the solution is really the right one, what is it that other funders didn't like about the story? I mean you were bought in that the you know that this was fundable but other investors saw something unfundable about it. And so why did it still you know why did those things still die in their in their tracks?
Kate Garrett:Yeah it's it's a great question. Ultimately right and I talked about for Sonder how do we make decisions at the top of the funnel investors are often unless you have true mission oriented investors, right? Who are not financially it's it's just you know curing cancer or access for certain geography financial investors are constantly assessing things on opportunity cost. If I put my dollar here versus my dollar there or there, what is the right return on capital? How do I look at a risk, you know, rick risk adjusted profile of these things. And the example where we you know that we felt like we really had the unmet need, we had the right solution it happened to be a capital equipment play in diagnostic medical imaging that had longer timelines, higher capital needs and they were fundraising this you know in a market this was 2020 um 20 late 2223 early 24 that wasn't taking that kind of risk return profile like they people were not looking for long-term high capital need projects venture capital had retracted significantly in that timeframe access to capital was a concern across the board and um I still still believe we could have changed so many patient lives with that technology and it honestly like gives me heartburn to this day. But um it just didn't it didn't go. And it's the reality this is capital markets. We couldn't convince people of that we couldn't convince them that this was a better return than other places they had to put their money and their time and we had to shut it down. The IP was bobbed by a major strategic in the space so I'm holding out hope right that this will at some point play a role in patient care. But it's just it's the reality that we don't have enough money to go around to do all these things and we're constantly assessing relative opportunity cost.
Swaril Mathur:Yeah that's that's a really disappointing tale and I'm sure that you know I am sure that that's not the only one like it out there of like something that was you know really had the potential to be game changing and had the potential to change lives but just the path to market was too challenging. And it you know it makes me think there's a million questions that pop up in my head of like well if if the problem was capital equipment is there would there have been a path to change the product so that it wasn't capital equipment.
Kate Garrett:That's being draws me we tried so many different ways but it's just you know I mean the other thing in that story is and this is a sensitive topic right between founders and entrepreneurs and investors, but we couldn't get alignment between the founders and the investor base in terms of the path to go down. We spent too much time going in circles internally that we wasted time and money that should have been spent getting support externally to do anything moving forward. And so by the time we were Forced to align internally because we had no money, then nobody outside wants to invest in that. You know, and so that was the other big learning there for both sides of the equation, right? For the founders and for the investors. It's so critical to have internal alignment because life is too short, time is too short, money is too precious to really spin your wheels, getting internal alignment around the path forward. Not to say you shouldn't have healthy debate and discussion, but you've got to efficiently get alignment so that you can go use your time and energy on the harder part, which is getting external people to believe in you and your story.
Swaril Mathur:Yeah. What's what's the how there? Like if you could go back in time or give advice to other founders who might find themselves in a similar situation to that, how do you avoid getting stuck in that turmoil, that internal kind of management decision-making turmoil?
Kate Garrett:Well, one from a governance standpoint, set yourselves up for not being in a tie situation. At the end of the day, organizations have to be able to move efficiently. You have to have a decision-making structure to allow decisions to be made, even if there's not a hundred percent alignment. So that's one thing. Two, you know, you should go into financing with alignment, with, you know, don't take capital from people that you don't feel you are aligned on what the long-term vision is, or that you have trust in that when they recommend something, right, they're seeing a lot of different versions of this. They're out in the capital markets talking to all their colleagues, knowing what they want to see. You, you know, at some point have to recognize the value that the investor is going to bring and trust that even if their perspective is different, right? That they might they bring a perspective that's different from yours as a founder operator who's just focused on your one thing and inside the walls of your building, largely. Um, so so that's what I would say. But um, yeah, the decision-making, efficient decision-making governance structures are important because you can never predict exactly how things will go.
Swaril Mathur:Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Um, talking about the other example you mentioned of a company that didn't go to plan, it sounded like that one. You said it was you brought the product to market and there just wasn't product market fit. But a lot of work happens before a product comes to market. And all of that work happened under the pretense that there was going to be product market fit. So there was some assumption, there was a hypothesis somewhere along the way that was formed based on some data that was later later proven to be untrue. So tell me a little bit more about what you learned from that and what what could have like what can other founders do to avoid falling in that pitfall and falling in love with a hypothesis that maybe isn't as vetted as it should be.
Kate Garrett:Well, thank you for giving us the benefit of the doubt that we did actually do some advanced work before making this decision. Um and it's so what I would say, you know, part of the learning there, this was an investment during COVID and product market fit was there in a world of COVID where we weren't getting together in person. We needed a lot more ways to connect virtually, we needed ways to disperse information that didn't require, and um, so the the early product market signals were very strong, sort of when the world looked a certain way. And then, but it takes time, right? It takes time to develop these products, it takes time to go out. And by the time they were commercial, the world had changed. We had we were no longer we were getting back to in-person medical conferences and doing a lot of hands-on sales work, FaceTime. And so the reality was we kind of thought certain behaviors would continue post-COVID, and that hypothesis didn't pan out. We were just wrong. Um so so product market fit when the world looked a certain way was there. And then when the world went back to a lot of pre-COVID norms, um, you know, we wanted to spend money on getting our reps FaceTime with our doctors and uh yeah, yeah.
Swaril Mathur:And in that instance, I mean, I I can imagine if you're in the early days of commercialization of a new technology, there's a lot of different ways that the revenue trajectory could look. And so how did you know, or how did the management team know that like what we're seeing is a signal of a true lack of product market fit? It's not just, oh, we need more feet on the street, oh, we need bigger marketing dollars, oh, if we just fix these three features, like it's that decision of how did you know pull the plug instead of double down and pour more dollars into it?
Kate Garrett:Yeah, that's a really good question. Cause again, it's like to Deb's point, is this a speed bump or a stop sign? Right. Um, in that case, and this wasn't a deal that I was on the board of. So again, I don't have as much visibility, but I would say um they didn't have enough leading at the end of the day, there weren't enough leading indicators that if we change things, that the commercial metrics would change, right? Whether it would be, you know, your expressions of interest or LOIs or willingness to financially support tweaking the product because they had a vested interest in this being modified to get to where they so yeah, it was just there weren't whether they weren't there or the team didn't good enough job of collecting them or presenting to the board, the board was not convinced that there was enough of a signal in order to warrant continuing to invest.
Swaril Mathur:Okay.
Deborah Kilpatrick:The other the other thing I would add, and I I I'm not uh adding in on this specific example because I would I wasn't here then, so I I can't opine on it, but I will say in the time frame that Kate is describing, so in the let's call it 2020 to 2022-ish time frame versus after 2022, in the former time frame, everybody rewarded the what of top line growth, not the how, the what. And then we shifted to post-COVID world from a financial performance standpoint where all of a sudden the how mattered a whole lot. Margin mattered. If you were in a software business, how much customization are you doing? You know, and so it it it became, I would say it, I don't know that this was related necessarily to that particular company trajectory, but I can tell you, having run a company across those periods, things changed very significantly for your arguments that were landing or not with regard to investor perception of your business and investor attractiveness to your business, like how they looked at your business and what they were going to invest into or not. And so that was a very, very difficult time. I mean, look, we've seen there's a there's a graveyard of companies, not at Sonder necessarily, but in general, I'm talking about in this valley of silicon that we're sitting in right now, that in that time frame did not make it because they could not transition from, you know, unrivaled, do whatever you have to do to drive growth to wait, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait, drive growth, but you have to do it this way and have a path to profitability. There's a lot of companies that did not make it through that. And I think it's particularly difficult for healthcare and med tech companies to do it because of the the absolute challenge of workflow changes. Product complexity evolves as workflow changes, and workflow changed a lot. Right. So anyway, I just wanted to sort of add that in that period.
Swaril Mathur:No, that's that's great context. And I think it's very much a, you know, that that new reality is one that I think many early and and uh mid-stage companies are are you know struggling to adapt to today. Um thinking through this this example, it kind of strikes me that that shutting something like that down relatively early in the commercialization journey is actually probably the most successful possible outcome. Where the alternative is everybody pouring more and more and more millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars into trying to launch another version, you know, hire three times as many salespeople, whatever. And so, and again, I don't know the exact stage at which uh this particular one was shut down and it's kind of here, neither here nor there. But I'm just curious from an investor perspective, everyone knows what a successful exit looks like. What is a successful shutdown look like? Do you guys have conversations around that? Do you have frameworks around that? And and are there moments where you, as the investor, have a different definition of, hey, this is the right point to shut it down or this is the best way to shut it down? And and that perspective is at odds with what the founders are incentivized to want.
Kate Garrett:It's such a great question, such a fun question, and also kind of an unknowable question because when you shut something down, you then don't know where it goes in the vast majority. Like what is the could have been? Every successful story had multiple near-death experiences. And within our partnership, right, Shockwave was the darling of the industry last year, $13 billion exit. Um, it was founded by our venture partner, co-founded by our venture partner Todd Brinton, and two of our partners were on the chairman of the board at different points. Shockwave had so many near-death experiences. It also almost got acquired for I think $300 million. Oh my god. It's like, okay, keep in mind that it went on to go public for I can't remember whatever billion half, growing to 13 billion. Like at any point, if it had you you just you just don't know. That's a great and so the ones that shut down, should it have gone or not? You know, I don't know. I do, um man, that's a really good question, Swirl. I don't know if I have an immediate answer of like what a good what's good looks like for shutting down, other than treating the shareholders in the most responsible best way you can, treating employees um as fairly and their families, right, as they they are dealing with that because that's the hardest part. Going to like I went when we shut down a company, it was my first company. I had to shut down um earlier this year. And I had to go to I went, I intentionally went to the farewell launch to say goodbye to the employees. And it was the hardest, probably one of the hardest things I've ever done in my career. It's just wow, looking those employees in the eyes and saying, I'm really sorry we couldn't figure this out. Like, I'm sorry for patients, I'm sorry for you guys.
Swaril Mathur:Like, ugh, it was awful. Wow. I mean, yeah, it makes sense that there's there's a lot of kind of case-by-case decision making that goes into it. But I think exactly what you just started, Shockwave is such a good example of this. And it's it's true of all of the big successes, right? For every one company that was one of these massive, massive exits, there were 10 others that were like one one tiny decision or one little pivot or one little change in a market factor away from also being there. And all of those big companies were also just that close to death. And I think that's exactly the thing that makes all these decisions so difficult is like you could imagine the temptation to for every, and I think this is probably true, is that every entrepreneur and innovator believes that they're the one, right, that's gonna take off. And they're like, no, no, I'm gonna be shockwave, not I won't list names, not any of the other companies that weren't shockwave, right? Um, but it's it's like there's just so much that has to go into understanding, you know, when the external factors really tell you that that's not gonna be the trajectory you're on, at least closing it down in in the most, you know, um, the most humane way, I guess is the is the best way to say it, with the least loss of of capital and the least kind of sunk time of uh of employees and everybody. I'm curious, and in all the time that you guys have been doing this, what happens to the teams behind ventures that aren't wild successes? Um, because on one hand, you know, I feel like that is actually a fantastic learning experience to be a management team of a company that did not have raging success. But um, those are not usually the leaders who are paraded around at conferences and get all of the, you know, all of the clout and the visibility. And I'm just I'm curious what happens in their career paths and and what you've seen.
Deborah Kilpatrick:I mean, I I'm really careful to always ask people, tell me the story of your of your career and don't send me your LinkedIn profile because I can go do that on my own. In fact, you should just believe that I've already done that, right? Like if I'm talking to a founder, a CEO, you can bet I've already done that. Um, or people I'm mentoring even. And I I will always ask them to please tell me the story of your career because what I'm really interested in, yes, I care if you've had lots of successful exits. Great. I'm gonna assume that you were a part of that, right? But I'm not gonna necessarily assume that you're to take all the blame if it didn't happen. And so I I want to give people a chance to tell me their story. And I'm always urging people get used to telling it as if you are describing your track record of what you've done and what you've learned without regard to what happened to the company. And because ultimately that's who I want to put in portfolio companies, right? Right. I want people with track records of experiences that cover the field, right? They're very broad, it's not just an inch deep, but you know, I I I really like broad for especially for general management and you know, sort of general sweet sweet roles. I actually don't mind if you've had failures along the way, but I do mind if you didn't learn something from that and you can't articulate it. And so that's the that's the key to me. And and so I think those people, Swarl, end up getting placed in management teams if they're able to really describe and think of themselves in that in that context, at least in my interactions with them. That's that's the way that I view it, including my own career, by the way. Like I've had plenty of failure, really.
Kate Garrett:But what I will say is um it truly, anybody who's been an entrepreneur and an operator knows that we all have failure. And to your question of what happens to those that fail, I'll just tell you in our firm, they go on to found Shockwave. Todd Brittany's prior company had raised tens and tens of millions of dollars and it shut down and failed. Did he stop innovating? No, he started Shockwave, which went on with two others, which went on to be probably one of the biggest stories of this decade. You've got Fred Mall, who is held up on a pedestal for good reason as one of the most successful entrepreneurs in our field. Did every single company he started succeed? No, it didn't. We talk, we focus on the big ones, but each of the greats have had failures. And what happens to them is they don't give up. They go, they start the next one. And uh again, it's that slight, that one moment that's slightly different where the next one becomes the aurus, the intuitive surgical, the shock wave that is out there changing patient lives every single day.
Swaril Mathur:Yeah, that is such a great point. That is such a great point. And all of the all of their quote unquote failures along the way don't get talked about anymore, but were probably actually instrumental in why they were able to ultimately be successful. Yeah. Yeah. So as we close out this conversation, I wanted to pivot a little bit and talk about mentorship. Um, this is something that uh, you know, maybe doesn't relate as closely to your day jobs, but again, as an area where the two of you are both quite similar, both of you are deeply involved in mentoring other emerging leaders, medtech innovators, et cetera, through various organizations, uh, Stanford Biodesign, MedTech Women, and I'm sure many, many, many others. You two are also insanely busy. And so I have so many questions for you about this. You know, why do you carve out time to do this? How do you do it? And what would you say to other aspiring, you know, to aspiring innovators who maybe aren't, particularly those that maybe aren't in the network, right? Those that don't have the really prestigious logos on their resumes and therefore don't have easy access to these really powerful networks. How can folks like that find really transformative mentorship like the type that you provide to so many people in our industry?
Kate Garrett:I can't wait to hear Deb's answer, honestly. Um, I will tell you, my answer for why I do it is simple in that it's because I get to meet people like you, Swarrel. You get to meet innovators who are also out there trying to change patient lives through technology, through innovation. And that is a big part of why I get up every day. Like this is a passion for me, not a job. And I want to surround myself with the best people who are motivated and also trying to do that. And I get so much energy genuinely from the fellows at Stanford Biodesign who are just so optimistic and idealistic, and they like they haven't been jaded by the world. And the, you know, and they just they're like, we're gonna change the world. And I'm like, Yes, you are. Thank you. You've just re-energized me to try to change the world. That's that's why I do it because it brings me just so much joy and energy. Um, and then, you know, a subpart of it is of course that I have benefited from so many people doing that for me. Deb being one of many, right, who were willing to take a call or sit down with me. I mean, I am eternally grateful to the people who have been willing to take time out of their day to mentor me. And it's they are innumerable and they have changed my life. And if I can pay it forward in any small amount, it's the least I can do. Um, let's maybe come back to how you get into the network because I think that's hard and it's important.
Deborah Kilpatrick:My answer to that question is I approach it from a an on the one hand, an altruistic place, and on the other hand, from a very pragmatic, tactical place. The altruism is is quite straightforward. I for people that don't know my background, I grew up in a really small town in rural Georgia. My father was a high school football coach, my mom was a preschool teacher. Um, I was incredibly um blessed to have the parents that I did who really academically encouraged me. I managed to get three degrees from Georgia Tech and I never paid a dime of tuition, which is incredible given given where I came from and the fact that we we didn't have a lot of money growing up, right? And if you look at me then and look at me now, I cannot tell you the dozens upon dozens of people that either gave me a chance or took a meeting with me or told me to try something, right, that I didn't think to try otherwise, or took a literally made a bet on me, right? Like in some one way or another. And so I feel a lot of uh I feel a lot of responsibility and accountability to do something good with that. Like I really do. And so there, I know it seems very Pollyanish and altruistic, but it, but it is very real for me. And so I am very committed to, you know, doing doing something with all of this effort, you know, words of of wisdom, uh, blessings, financial bets that the world has kind of given me, and I'm trying to do something good with it. The the tactical pragmatic part of it is look, in whether whether I'm a CEO or whether I'm in um uh a director in a a big a big cap large cap med tech or whether I'm a venture capitalist, or regardless, if I'm in this world of med tech that we're in, trying to impact patients and build new companies and build new things and change the standard standard of care, I need talent. I need talent, I need talent to do it. Not just CEO. I need talent to do it, and I need a pipeline of talent that I can always kind of look at and say, wow, this unique assemblage of people could do something incredible together versus this unique assemblage of people could do something incredible together. And so there's a very pragmatic and tactical reason that I that I network the way. Way that I do aside from the altruistic part, which is very real for me. And so I it's it's both of those things.
Swaril Mathur:Really something both of those things. Something I love about what you both just said is actually that you get something out of the mentorship too, right? And I remember, you know, way back when I was in grad school at Stanford having a mentor who was advising me on how to find other mentors who gave me the advice of like, always try to think about it as a relationship. It's not some transactional thing where you're taking something. And I remember at the time being like, what? Of course it is. Of course it's transactional. I'm getting advice and time from this incredibly busy, experienced person. They're getting nothing from me, right? But what you just said is such a good reminder to other early career folks out there that that's not actually necessarily true. Every time, you know, every time someone is reaching out to try to get advice from someone, the person who's giving the advice might be getting, you know, just the satisfaction of knowing that they've helped someone, a really energizing conversation that's like putting a pep in the step for the rest of the day, um, or an awesome human who they might hire 10 years from now, right? And so I I love that you both mentioned that because I think it does flip the model on its head a little bit of like mentees are not, you know, don't need to put this burden on themselves that they are taking. They, you know, it it really is relationship building. Yes.
Kate Garrett:Yeah. So let's come back to your question of how do you get in, right? If there, um, if you're not in a in the Stanford community, right? How do you get to meet mentors like Deb and I, who who spend a lot of time in that that world. And um, and there are many, many other examples of amazing um academic institutions or communities, but it's really hard, right? Because we you only as a mentor, you only have so many hours in the day. You have your own job, you have real responsibilities that you and so you do have to triage, and and everybody's gonna have their own triage filters, whether it be, you know, certain demographics that they want to support, whether it be certain communities of, you know, Stanford Biodesign, or it be that, well, you know, Deb asked me to meet with this person, so of course I'm gonna do it because it's a you know, wanna uh support Deb, who's somebody I care about. So it's really tough. You just kind of have to know that. Like we only have so much time. And um, I would say the way to increase your odds is to come through some type of shared connection. So even if like one, some of the most creative people I've seen with getting an intro to me is they'll reach out if it's a CEO of a company, they'll reach out to one of the portfolio company CEOs, right? That I'm involved with, they'll build a connection with that CEO. Because CEO to CEO, we can share whatever, you know, we can share information, we can share comp data, like, hey, I'm dealing with this challenge. What do you? And then they get the portfolio CEO to email me and say, Kate, I really like this person. Would you meet with them? You know, so it's find, find a way in. You can do it tangentially, but you be creative about the ways you come in.
Deborah Kilpatrick:Yeah, and and you said something you said, I'll underline these, these are relationships, right? And we've had, you know, we have MedTech Women was built out of initial relationships of a group of people who had grown kind of grown up in our early careers and mid-careers together at Gaiden, right? Like that's that was the node. And so these are not just short-term transactional relationships, these are long-term relationships with people who, in some cases, become your your your your great friends and you know, almost as close as your family members. Um, and they are people that you can rely on. They're not just people that you're giving things to, right? Like these are these are not just short-term things. And I agree with you, Swirl. That is good advice to to for for I think young young people in the sector to think about. It's like, look, you're you're not just taking, you're actually giving something, if not immediately, then longer term. And it's it to look at it that way, I think is a more is a more realistic and healthy way of looking at mentoring, uh, that it goes both ways. And um ideally, by the way, also I'll say ideally, when people want to be mentored or they want to have a mentoring meeting, they have a very specific objective for it. Very specific. And that will, by definition, make the process more efficient to Kate's point of like, yes, you're often dealing with people who have very limited bandwidth time-wise, but you know, make it make it objective-driven. Guess what? Busy people love objective-driven meetings.
Kate Garrett:Okay, here's another practical tip, right? So thinking about med tech women, give back before you ask to receive. So volunteer if if yeah, volunteer into an organization, show you are willing to put some time in to give back to the community, and then you can ask for similar things. So a lot of women will volunteer at MedTech Women and do various committees or organize an event. That makes it so much easier to then reach out and to be like, right, hey Deb, I'm I've been volunteering at MedTech Women, an organization she's really passionate about. Would you open your network up to me? I'm looking to meet XYZ, or write similarly, any any form of or you know, offer to help and then ask for help in return.
Swaril Mathur:Yep, yep, absolutely. And and that initial step of getting involved is proof that the individual has a level of initiative, a level of passion, right? And and kind of just uh meets that initial bar of like, is this someone with the hood spa um that that therefore you know deserves uh deserves some extra time and attention? That that is all great advice. And I I really appreciate those reflections. And, you know, again, I am I am one of many, many, many people in our industry who have benefited from your mentorship and from mentorship of many others like you in the industry who who choose to spend their time this way. And it's one of my favorite things about working in MedTech is that it doesn't feel like medtech is some abstract industry. It feels like it is, in fact, a community, a very vibrant one, a very close-knit one, a very mission-driven one. And one where I think everyone who's part of it, you know, has this internal drive to give just as much as they take, right? Well said. Okay, Kate and Deb, this has been a super fun conversation. Um, before we wrap up, I have one rapid fire question for you each. What is one lesson that you know now that you wish you had learned earlier in your career?
Kate Garrett:Okay, I'm gonna say I actually learned this early in my career, but I learn it every single year again and again. So I think it still qualifies. And that's it's all about the people. It's all about the people you work with. Things get hard. You've got, you know, you learn from the people around you. You can work through almost any challenge if you've got the right team around you. Pick the best people to surround yourself with in terms of their values, their capabilities, they're willing to dig in when things get tough and persevere, despite the speed bumps. Awesome.
Deborah Kilpatrick:That's great. And mine is learn how to use your energy. I I it took me a long time. I'm still learning by the way, as Kate can tell you. I don't get it perfectly right all the time. Uh, but I learning how to uh throttle gas, I call it throttle gas, throttle gas, throttle gas, and learning, learning to recognize situations where your energy is actually super helpful to move something forward or to resolve a discussion or to weigh in for some reason. Equally important, learn how to recognize when your energy actually will harm the situation in some way. It could be that you're taking away other people's opportunity to solve a problem. It could be that you're um unintentionally shutting people down. It could be that you're just flat out wrong and you need to just listen a little bit longer in that moment, right? But learning how to use your energy is the thing that I have worked on the most as a leader and the thing that I often watch in others to learn from.
Swaril Mathur:That is that is such great advice. Thank you both for sharing those little tidbits and everything that you've shared in this conversation. This has been very eye-opening and a ton of fun. Thanks. Thank you, Swarl. Thank you, Swirl. Good to see you.