
After helping take NeuroPace public, the engineer-turned-operator returned to a small clinical-stage company. His career makes a case for learning every room before taking the corner office.

A first-generation device, dozens of prototypes and a pandemic could have ended Transverse Medical. Eric Goslau turned each interruption into another design brief - and made resilience part of the product.
Medtronic began by repairing hospital electronics in a Minneapolis garage. Seventy-seven years later, its devices sit inside bodies, beside beds, and at the center of a high-stakes contest to make medicine less invasive, more measurable, and easier to scale.
Vahid Saadat is a serial medical device entrepreneur and co-founder and co-CEO of Inquis Medical, a Menlo Park, California company building the AVENTUS Thrombectomy System for treating venous thromboembolic disease and pulmonary embolism. With more than 25 years in medtech and over 200 issued and pending patents, he has founded or led a string of companies including Voyage Medical, USGI Medical, AngioTrax, Baxano and Arrinex (maker of ClariFix, later acquired by Stryker). He holds a BS in Electrical Engineering and an MS in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, and runs Inquis alongside co-CEO Mojgan Saadat.
Procyrion, Inc. is a Houston-based medical device company developing Aortix, a catheter-delivered percutaneous mechanical circulatory support (pMCS) pump. About the width of a pencil, Aortix is anchored in the descending aorta where it unloads the failing heart while boosting blood flow to the kidneys, targeting acute decompensated heart failure and cardiorenal syndrome. The device holds FDA Breakthrough Device Designation and is in the DRAIN-HF pivotal IDE trial after closing a $57.7M Series E in February 2024.