Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to the Blueprint brought to you by Brilliant Pathways. I'm your host, Manny Tejeda. In this forward thinking podcast, we explore the evolving challenges and opportunities in preparing students for college and career success.
Offering expert insights, actionable strategies and real life stories to help listeners better support young people as they draw their future.
Today, we're shining a spotlight on entrepreneurship, what it means, why it matters, and how it's becoming a vital skill for the next generation.
The world of work is shifting faster than ever. Some of the most exciting opportunities tomorrow haven't even been invented yet. In the spirit to build, innovate and lead is more important than ever today. Joining us we have a special guest and a long standing supporter of Brilliant Pathways, Dr. John Fortune. Dr. Fortune is a clinical professor of surgery, the CEO of a medical simulation company. In a seasoned entrepreneur whose career bridges medicine, education and business, he leads ventures like Symbivo in Thorovations, developing new life saving healthcare products. Dr. Fortune, welcome.
[00:01:17] Speaker B: Thank you very much, Manny. And. And thanks to CFES Brilliant Pathways for the invitation.
Yeah.
[00:01:24] Speaker A: So John, I've shared a little bit about you, but I always ask our guests, can you share a little bit about yourself? Obviously this is a nice welcome, but it's always better when we hear it directly from you all.
[00:01:36] Speaker B: Well, you know, Manny, I'm primarily trained as a trauma and critical care surgeon. Actually I graduated from medical school, performing a residency for seven years and then entered into a 36 year career as an academic surgeon. So my job activities while I was active in medicine was not only to provide care to trauma victims, burn victims, and critically ill and injured patients, but I also was a surgical educator, very interested in medical residents, surgical residents, students, nurses, and helping them fulfill their dreams in their own medical careers.
So my career pathway was a little bit circuitous in that I traveled to a lot of different medical schools and hospitals to really achieve some of the goals that I wanted to in terms of being a surgeon and being a surgical educator.
[00:02:37] Speaker A: That's awesome. So obviously you worked all around the world. So what drew you to entrepreneurship and what do you think is the biggest challenge for aspiring entrepreneurs today?
[00:02:48] Speaker B: Right, well, I can tell you, as I stated, I was a surgical educator and a lot of surgical education in the early 2000s was basically done on a chalkboard or with PowerPoint. But surgery is a hands on activity. And just about that time, surgical simulation and medical simulation and education became quite popular.
And in around 2008, I was involved with some surgical simulation and noted that there was a task that all medical students and even Some of the advanced nursing students needed to learn, and that was suturing. How do you put a stitch in somebody?
And in a learning environment that was very safe. In other words, we don't want to teach our medical students how to do things on patients.
So I looked around to see what instruments and equipment was available for surgical simulation, for putting in stitches. And you know what I said? I said to myself, I can do better than what's out there. Not only better in terms of quality, but better in terms of cost. And I could make a learning system that was going to be affordable to students, that each student could have their own and could practice anywhere they wanted. They didn't have to practice in the hospital.
And that's what started simvivo. And it's grown quite nicely since that time to include not only suturing practice, but not tying practice, how to put bowel together, how to do biopsies. A whole list of different activities are included in our inventory.
For me, it was challenging in the beginning, but it's been a lot of fun. And for a while I was a surgeon and an entrepreneur in terms of surgical education.
And then I transitioned when I retired from medicine into being a full time entrepreneur with this educational activity. It's been a lot of fun.
[00:05:01] Speaker A: So education has been really a core of what you've done. That's your bridge, right? Like from teaching others to now running companies that help minimize risk. Right. Like to your point of, you don't want people learning with actual patients.
And I think you talked a little bit about finding that need, or it wasn't like they weren't other companies doing this, but you knew you could do it better. And I think that comes obviously from your experience, but also your mindset. So one of the things I want to kind of shift gears and talk a little bit about, you know, you started a business, but really it was more about the mindset. Right. So I think can we talk a little bit about how you went about solving problems that you saw and not just following instructions?
[00:05:53] Speaker B: Well, first of all, you have to identify the problem. But even before that, you've got to decide in your own mind whether you want to be an entrepreneur.
You know, I had a job at that time. I was getting a paycheck every two weeks. I was working in a large hospital organization.
I had a confident schedule that I could deal with. Being an entrepreneur is a little different.
You know, it's not quite the same consistent lifestyle as that. And I decided I wanted to try it. You know, I've always been kind of a risk taker. I've always been kind of an adventurer, and I said, why not get into this? But I also had to identify a business that I knew a lot about, you know, and certainly I probably knew as much about surgical education as anybody. I had to identify a customer base that would buy my product. Well, medical students, nursing students, hospital simulation labs. And then I just had to. I kind of hate to say it like this, but I kind of had to jump off the cliff. I had to say, okay, today is a day that I want to start being an entrepreneur. And I just kind of hoped that when I jumped off that cliff, my parachute opened so that I wouldn't fall too far. But it worked out for me.
[00:07:09] Speaker A: Right? That's awesome. That's awesome.
So across the nation and here at Brilliant Pathways, we're seeing youth being interested in entrepreneurship. And as a matter of fact, more than 40% of teens and young adults are interested in entrepreneurship. Obviously, now we have online platforms, crowdfunding, new technologies that make launching a business more accessible than ever. But I think if, if I hear you correctly, a lot of the success still depends heavily on yourself.
At Berlin Pathways, as you know, we call those kind of the essential skills. Right?
[00:07:45] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:07:45] Speaker A: What other skills would you say helped you to influence your success?
[00:07:52] Speaker B: Well, you know, you've got to be confident in your own abilities, Right. I can't reflect more on your comments about the essential skills. The essential skills are the basis for everything, whether you're employed, whether you're an entrepreneur. But you got to have confidence in yourselves. You got to be willing to take the risk of starting a business and knowing that the path towards success may not be easy, but you have to be resilient in pursuing that path. You've got to find something that you're interested in and you're an expert in, and perhaps better than anybody else in the community in terms of making it work. And then you have to get a mentor. You've got to find somebody that's been there, done that, so they can help you get started in that business. Might be a parent, might be a sibling, might be a friend of the family, but that is really going to be your ticket to success, is having somebody help guide you through the process of being an entrepreneur. It's not easy, but I can tell you it's very gratifying as you go through the process. And I can't emphasize once again more about the basic skills and your pursuit of knowledge, not only in your formal education, but but after you get out of school. Entrepreneurship requires A feeling of lifelong learning. You've got to keep up with what you're doing, not only because you've got to beat the competition, but as you know, and what they teach at Brilliant Pathways is things change. Things are changing, and you've got to stay on top of what's changing in your particular field in order to beat out the competition.
[00:09:38] Speaker A: Now, John, I have to ask, did you have a mentor, an entrepreneurship mentor?
[00:09:44] Speaker B: No.
And I can tell you that it was one of the biggest mistakes I made because I had to learn on the fly. I had to kind of learn each step of the process of constructing my equipment and getting the appropriate people to test it and developing a market for my equipment. I can tell you that my start was really slow.
You know, it took me about five or six years to get my feet on the ground and figure out what I was doing. I think if I had a mentor that could have given me the advice that I needed in those early stages, helped guide me through the startup part of my company, I probably would have reduced my time to success by several years.
And I can't recommend that more mentors really are important.
Yeah. Now, let me. And I'm not gonna. I'm probably gonna deny that I ever said this, but there's a lot of virtual mentors that you can rely upon or access on the Internet. But having a. A person that you can share your ideas with and get advice from, I think is essential.
[00:11:01] Speaker A: So that's a nice reflection of, obviously, your first venture. How was that different for your second venture?
What did you change between them?
[00:11:11] Speaker B: Well, it was a little bit of a different enterprise that I got involved with, actually. This was in response to a grant opportunity that was available for small businesses. And it was a grant opportunity in the area of education, surgical education.
And I saw the request for proposal, and again, I looked at it, and I said, I can do that.
And I wrote the application and fortunately got funded. And we got started on the project. And this was a while ago, and I thought the project was going fairly well, but we didn't get renewed funding.
So five years later, another one came by. I said, I can do this. And it was completely outside the realm of medical and surgical education. It was the development of a new device for treating chest injuries. And I knew a lot about chest injuries, and I had a great idea of what. How I could respond.
So I sent in an application. Fortunately, I got funded. And this funding went all the way through to the point where we are now submitting our device for FDA approval and hopefully will have an impact on healthcare in the future. Now, did I get a mentor for that? Yes. And I think that really contributed to my success. It was actually somebody in the field of medical device development who gave me an incredible amount of guidance on how I should pursue this.
Now I will say this has been a five year project that I thought at the outset was going to be two years. And so patience is a key in building a business, by all means.
[00:13:00] Speaker A: So that, that's awesome. Now, thinking about our audience, obviously educators, parents, after they listen to this episode, how can they help their kids foster an entrepreneurship mindset, in your opinion?
[00:13:16] Speaker B: Well, I think, I think they have to give their potential entrepreneur a lot of freedom, you know, and they can encourage entrepreneurship, but I don't think they should discourage a traditional path in employment.
You know, being employed has a lot of benefits. You get a paycheck every two weeks. You have a consistent schedule. You in a large organization know exactly where you stand in that organization and there's a lot of stability.
My thought would be, well, encourage your potential entrepreneur to kind of start a career in a standard way with the idea that starting the business should go hand in hand with employment. And then gradually you can encourage the person to switch slowly from their employed position into a position of running their own business.
Encouragement, I think is the best thing that you could do to the potential entrepreneur and give them positive feedback as much as you can.
You have to recognize that there's going to be disappointment in starting your own business that will need to be supported along the way. So you know, in summary, I would say give encouragement, give support, give knowledge, but whatever you can do to provide a good environment for that entrepreneur to succeed.
And of course there's always emphasis on knowledge and self education and those things that are promoted by CFEs. Brilliant pathways.
[00:15:01] Speaker A: I think the other things which you have been very helpful in allowing us to bridge interests into students wanting to go into medical fields would be like at career days, bringing the hands on. They get to do that. Not just listen to someone talk about this is what you would do if you go into this path, but really get hands on learning. I think that's a really important opportunity for students. Also. The other thing is, as you know, we help students kind of help with pitch challenges. So thinking about go into a day as a teacher, you can figure out a problem and then have the students kind of do what they got to do to figure out a solution. That might be another way in which that can be embedded into the classroom opportunity in a way that allows them to explore.
And not. It's not about perfection, really. It's about the skills that they develop for trying.
[00:16:05] Speaker B: Right, right. And just like our business Sim Vivo, it's simulation. If you can simulate situations in which they can express their interest in entrepreneurialism and actually give it a go in. In a protected environment, you know, what better opportunity to do that in medicine? You know, I think in encouraging a career in medicine, and there's all types of different careers in medicine besides being a physician, that you've got to give them a hook. You've got to give them some sort of opportunity to see what it's about rather than just textbooks and that type of learning. And allowing them to do some simulation of surgical techniques is a lot of fun and also kind of gives them the. An opportunity to see that medicine can be right for them. And it's also a little bit exciting and they can get a little bit of a encouragement to consider medicine as a career.
[00:17:09] Speaker A: And that's just one of the ways. Right. I want to echo what you mentioned about connecting students with mentors, educators, as parents, we can certainly do that with local entrepreneurs.
You know, as, you know, we do this work across the country and, you know, it's not just one pocket, but I think it really helps giving students those real world experiences whenever possible.
[00:17:32] Speaker B: Right. I think that's very important.
[00:17:34] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, any. Any parting comments or advice you want to give to our audience?
[00:17:40] Speaker B: No, I think that allowing a student or a young person to explore entrepreneurial chips is an excellent idea. I would recommend it as part of the educational process. And I think what you're doing here at CFES Brilliant Pathways, is a wonderful example of that.
[00:18:02] Speaker A: Well, thank you so much, John, for joining us and for our audience for being champions of Brilliant Pathways to our future entrepreneurs. We'll see you next time on the Blueprint podcast.
[00:18:13] Speaker B: Okay, great. Thank you, Manny.
[00:18:16] Speaker A: Support for this podcast comes from Brilliant Pathways, an organization that had spent over 30 years helping students make opportunities happen.
Connect with us wherever you get your podcasts. And thank you for joining us on the Blueprint. I'm Manny Tejeda, your host, and I'll see you next time.
