Victor Pikov on starting a bioelectronic medicine company after working at Galvani

Neural Implant podcast - the people behind Brain-Machine Interface revolutions

Dr Victor Pikov is the founder and CEO of Medipace, a sacral nerve stimulation neuromodulation company and VP of Technology at TRI, Trans Stimulation Incorporated. He also worked at Galvani, a joint venture between Google and GSK as well as working in academia before.

Top 3 Takeaways

• "When you try to speak to potential investors who consider themselves experts in medical devices, they typically fall into three categories: One is no experience with neuromodulation and another bucket is experienced with wearable neuromodulation. And the third very small bucket is experience with implantable class three neuromodulation."
• "Chinese VCs, typically are much younger, often they're less than 30 years old. And they're joining typically in larger numbers, about four to six to the zoom meetings versus one to two in the US and they're also being rather silent during the presentations."
• " [A surgeon] showed a whole bunch of photographs of failed implantations and you could see all kinds of ways it possibly can fail. This is very educational. It's much better than showing a picture of a working implant."

0:45 "Do you want to introduce yourself?"

1:15 "You were working at Galvani... do you want to explain it and what the, what this venture was aiming?"

8:00 "So you were there for three years and then you decided to go do your own thing, did you see a need in the market?"

12:15 "Let's talk about these NIH, SBR grants"

19:00 "You were pitching to VCs in China. And so now you have a comparison, the US versus China. So what's that like?"

21:00 "A lot of people are a little bit nervous about working with China or Chinese companies because of intellectual property. They're worried that their technology will be stolen or copied. Is that something that people should be worried about? Is that how did you approach it?"

25:15 You guys decided to use an off-the-shelf IPG instead of developing your own one, why?

30:45 Can you talk about the small neurotech meetings you organized?

34:15 "So you're saying as an academician, you had lots of time, but now you don't."

35:15 "Is there anything that we didn't talk about that you wanted to mention?"

Here is the link to 5 conferences that Dr Pikov helped to organize:

https://neuroprostheticdevicesconferences.wordpress.com/