Hello [MedTech] World
By: Mike Carter
Tags: Medtech, Autonomous Vehicles, Careers, Self Driving Cars, AI

Two years ago — nearly to the day — I boarded a flight from San Francisco to visit my family in San Diego. I had taken similar flights dozens of times that year since my mother had been diagnosed with cancer. It was her second battle against the disease, which at alternating moments made me optimistic — she had beaten the disease once before — and despairing; the oncologists had suggested that this second battle would not be an easy one.

The news of her diagnosis intertwined temporally with an exciting moment in my entrepreneurial career. In April of the same year I had decided to leave an engaging job working on self-driving vehicles at Uber ATG to become a founding engineer at Kodiak Robotics. I was 24 years old at the time, and while I had earned my chops at Stanford, Otto, and Uber, I was grateful to Don Burnette and Paz Eshel for recognizing the firepower I could bring to Kodiak.

2018 was a roller coaster year for me. I brimmed with pride architecting and implementing first versions of many of our autonomy software modules alongside multi-industry veteran and Kodiak’s other founding engineer, Zac Vawter. I called home anxiously at the end of long startup days to ask my dad for updates on my mom’s latest blood test results. I soared with the Kodiak team through the jubilation of making our first great hires — bringing on robotics talents such as Andreas Wendel, Aaron Sellars, Collin Otis, Felix Duvallet, Jay Kuvelker, Philip Metzler, and many more as the year went on. I prayed through tears at night after learning that yet another treatment had failed to turn the tables in my mother’s battle. I celebrated massive Kodiak milestones like the close of our Series A financing and our first successful autonomous drives, and then I hurried to the airport to get down to San Diego to spend the weekends with my mother, refusing to verbalize that all of these trips were motivated by a tacit, “just in case”.

At various points in the ride, I struggled with an emotion that was difficult to explain: a sense of guilt that I was not devoting myself, and all of the academic, engineering, and creative skills that I was employing at work, to the battle that my mother was fighting. Surely if I committed myself to deep study of the latest papers and research I could help suggest treatment options that may not have been considered? Each time I sat down to read an oncology review paper, I wrote down a page of oncology terms that were new to me so that I could research them further. I didn’t get very far before I had to wrap up and get a few hours of sleep to fuel me for the day ahead at Kodiak. There’s a reason that oncologists go through many years of training — medicine just isn’t a drag-and-drop field and the body is not a hello-world program.

One of the rare times my mother and I stopped for a picture on a San Diego morning hike.

In a teary-eyed conversation with my mother, I admitted to her that I felt I was failing her. She had always encouraged me to pursue a career in medicine. She had even persisted in this gentle encouragement after I changed my major from pre-med to engineering. We agreed that health science presented an undeniable opportunity to bring good to people’s lives. I never quite convinced her that by doing engineering I would open up avenues to affect positive change that, given my particular blend of aptitudes and interests, rivaled or even surpassed what I could do by going to medical school. I saw tech as a way to build the future of human happiness, productivity, and thus further happiness. Furthermore, I knew I was better at deriving systems’ governing equations and writing code than I was at memorizing anatomy and latin words. My mother had not intended to burden me, and she made clear when I opened up about my failed attempts to help her that she was very proud of my mission at Kodiak. She urged me, even through her last few days, to continue following my heart, and to remain intentional in my efforts to bring good to the people of our world.

Over the last two years since my mother passed away, I’ve been developing this guidance into a longer-term plan. It started with building Kodiak into the industry’s best-positioned company for autonomous trucking. We have made the fastest progress in the industry with a team much smaller and more disciplined than many of our worthy competitors. Looking ahead, I see myself leading creative and entrepreneurial efforts to solve difficult problems and generate value with cutting edge technology. My recent challenge has been to decide how to turn this plan into concrete next steps.

Enter Duke Rohlen. Duke has been a trusted mentor of mine since I met him when I was in college. To anyone in the field of medtech, he likely needs no introduction. To my network in AVs and software tech, I’ll describe him as a powerhouse in medical entrepreneurship and investing, and then I’ll refer you to many articles written about him and his fund, Ajax Health. Duke and I clicked from the start, bonding over the value of being go-getters, believing in ourselves and the people around us, and blazing trails with accountability for our impact. Over the years, I’ve benefited from Duke’s invaluable advice, and admired the way he propels value creation in his industry.

The next steps on my path became clear when Duke called me about some new ideas coming together in the Ajax ecosystem. His voice was loaded with excitement and possibility. We had spoken before about his work, but this time he had a different goal in mind; to see if I was interested in joining him. He made it clear that he wasn’t asking me to abandon the world of tech to work on medical devices. He wanted me to bring my world of tech to his — and open up new possibilities through the fusion of the two spaces. What are we working on? I encourage you to stay tuned — or reach out if you really want to chat — but suffice it to say that this sounded like the moment I had been waiting for to bring my skills and my expertise to a medical world that is ripe with possibilities for impact and opportunity. It was the missing idea that my mother and I would have both agreed was the right way for me to touch people’s lives.

I’ll be exploring new possibilities for impact and value creation in the fusion of tech and medicine.

I’ll be joining Ajax to cultivate ideas in the intersection of medicine and today’s high-integrity software, data, and tech thinking. I’ll be learning the ropes on financing and driving innovation from some of the best in the business, and honing operating skills I’ve developed at Kodiak as I bring some of our new visions to fruition. I’m stepping into this new opportunity the same way I stepped into Kodiak — excited about just how much learning lies ahead of me, and determined to be intentional about using my talent and experience to bring good to the people of our world.