The following interview is a conversation we had with Nan-Wei Gong, CEO & Founder of FIGUR8, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $40 Million Raised to Build the Future of Musculoskeletal Health and Injury Data Solutions.

 

Nan-Wei Gong
Hello, Brett. Thank you for having me here today. 

Brett
Yeah, no problem. So I’d love to just begin with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background. 

 
Nan-Wei Gong
Absolutely. So my name is Nan-Wei Gong. I’m founder and CEO of Figur8. My background is in engineering. I have a PhD from the MIT media lab. Really in sensor design. So I started as a material scientist, physicist, and really fascinated by designing sensors to interface between people and computers. So the foundation work of the company really is about this technology sensing technology that we developed, and it’s really set up to disrupt healthcare and providing better data for muscle with delta health. 

Brett
Ian, growing up, did you have a fascination with sensors or where did that come from? 

 
Nan-Wei Gong
I’ve always wanted to be a musician and classically trained. I played violin. We probably saw my studio, were just talking earlier, and I started my PhD in the media lab. And the music side is people make electronic music, will make analog synthesizers. And my group is big on designing music interfaces. And that is different input modalities. Like my advisor built the first smart shoes for dancers to create their own music, for example. So there is a connection there. 

Brett
Got it. Makes a lot of sense. And did you always know that at some point you were going to start a company? Or where did that entrepreneurial drive and spirit come from?

Nan-Wei Gong
I know that since undergrad school, I hustle a lot. But starting a company was never like a goal growing up. But the last year of my grad school degree, I did participate MIT 100k competition. And my team won the 100k competition. So that whole process really opened up all the opportunities of, like, entrepreneurship as a potential career for me. And I’ve never had a job day since I graduated. This is the third company that I started.

Brett
Let’s dive right into this third company. So take us back to. Looks like January 2017 is when the company was founded. Take us back to those early days.

Nan-Wei Gong
Well, the early days really is. I mentioned that we work on muscular skeletal health, and the backstory is that when I was at MIT, our group worked in sensor technology. My advisor built the shoe, and mass general called him in early 2000 and said, you know what? We have all these equipment that is impossible to capture the patients or even athletes movement properly when there are all these cables around them. So the concept of wearable computing and how do we make computers small enough so people don’t have to have a lot of cables on them was really pioneered by this group at the media lab. So, seven years ago, I’ve decided that I would like to start a company, really taking all the research, decades and decades of research and design concepts into a company, because the technology was finally there, battery wireless computing.

Nan-Wei Gong
And the time is right for people to accept the concept of wearable computers. So the early days really is looking at how we can design something so that we can reduce the cost of existing equipment, like a biomechanics lab, to less than 10% of the cost, 5% of the cost. And how do we reduce the time of running these assessments? Normally, it takes 4 hours in the lab to ten minutes. The goal is to create something that can revolutionize, like a good thing that we know exists in the world and make it accessible for everyone. So that really is the target. Lots of development, lots of thinking on designing a system.

Brett
And what stage of commercialization are you at today? 

Nan-Wei Gong
Now we are commercially available. We have our solution, that’s hardware, software, app, data analytics. And we are in about 15 states with multiple physical therapy clinics as the main point of surface. 

 
Brett
How many years did it take from the start in 2017 until you were commercially ready to sell and start making money?

Nan-Wei Gong
Five years.

Brett
Wow.

Nan-Wei Gong
Yep. But that includes a pivot during COVID.

Brett
Talk to us about the pivot.

Nan-Wei Gong
Yeah. Initially we’re really focused on professional sports, and they have these biomechanics lab that cost maybe quarter million dollars to set up. But can you imagine? You ask a pitcher to pitch indoors, it’s just impossible. So we know the demands there to have wearable solution to capture biomechanics movement, to see how people move outside of the lab. So that was the focus. We were successful at engaging many professional teams. We were set up to be in the Olympics as the assessment tool in the olympian village. It just didn’t happen because of COVID So we did a hard pivot into healthcare, which is a long term target that we know is always there. But there is a lot of complexity in going to market in healthcare, especially in the US.

Nan-Wei Gong
So that was the pivot, and were already a commercialized solution before that, before the current business that we are running, it’s a two years old business.

Brett
And what are the typical customers look like? Can you paint a picture for us?

Nan-Wei Gong
Yeah. So have you ever been to a physical therapy clinic and, you know, just trying to understand what happened when you have pain?

Brett
I have. I had a shoulder injury back when I was very young, but I was doing physical therapy for probably three to six months before I gave up. So it didn’t feel like it was doing anything.

Nan-Wei Gong
Absolutely. That is exactly why this is important for me personally and for all the customers that we service. So I had a frozen shoulder problem during COVID I couldn’t move my shoulder. And if you go to a clinic, that is when you don’t have a broken bone, the only thing that they can do for you is through experience, through manual tests on how much you can move. What’s your strength normally is manual muscle testing, and you just don’t know if you’re making progress. Now, I believe in the profession, and I know that through physical therapy, I’ve made so much improvement of my personal health. But there is no way to quantify the progress or the severity of an injury in this industry.

Nan-Wei Gong
So what we do really is to provide tools for physical therapists to quantify and to assess the severity and the progress of the patient, and to be able to show that progress to the patient and to the payers to really demonstrate the value of these treatments. So our typical customers are outpatient physical therapy clinics, and they use our solution, from the device to the app that help them capture these file signals to a report that’s really easy to describe the injury progress and recovery progress, both to the patient and to the insurance company. 

Brett
And is this group of buyers normally open to new technology, or does it require a tremendous amount of education to get them to understand why it is what you do and why it’s important?

Nan-Wei Gong
Yeah, they don’t accept new technology historically, just because this is a business that, you know, the only technology in a clinic that you see is a fax machine. But we have been successful because first we have very strong, like the team knowledge about how healthcare works. And we create different from the program to how we handle the reporting, how we build a relationship with insurance payers, so that we reduce a lot of the friction away from a traditionally hardware business. So I call it a solution instead of a hardware or a medical device. Because what we do is not just about here is a device that helps you measure something. After that, well, help yourself. Like, I don’t know, it’s your problem. We take a lot of these education to the providers and for their payers insurance companies to our own hands.

Nan-Wei Gong
And we help them communicate and we help them understand what are the value proposition between a physical therapist to the payers insurance companies and to the patients. So we definitely did not stop at the hardware sales level.

Brett
This show is brought to you by Front Lines Media podcast production studio that helps B2B founders launch, manage and grow their own podcast. Now, if you’re a founder, you may.

Brett
Be thinking, I don’t have time to host a podcast.

Brett
I’ve got a company to build. Well, that’s exactly what we built our service to do. You show up and host and we handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit Frontlines.io slash podcast. Now back today’s episode. Can you dive a bit deeper into the marketing philosophy and how you approach marketing and how you think about marketing?

Nan-Wei Gong
Yes, the marketing, it’s a b, two b model, right? People don’t buy our device from our website. But I think that the learning really is to understand that when you have a complex business, especially in healthcare, there are three different parties to serve. There’s the payer provider and the patient. So everyone needs something different. And how do we align incentive and really understand how information flows and how money flows, where we stand within those three parties so that we reduce as much friction as possible. And that has been a detective work, starting from myself to hiring the whole commercial team that really understand how things move, how information moves, how money moves, and how both businesses run.

Nan-Wei Gong
And that I would say if you are just a hardware founder, that’s something that there’s no way that I would have understand without the help of someone that’s really experienced in the industry. 

 
Brett
You tell us about building out that commercial team and what you’ve learned from building a commercial team.

Nan-Wei Gong
Absolutely. I can tell you the early days of how it all went. I know that we have to decide there are three parties, who is the customer. And building the commercial team means that I need to first understand the business a little bit. So I just went to a physical therapy clinic that is friendly and said that, can I pay you whatever you make for 3 hours and just watch how money flow. And I learned a lot. I learned that there are different types of payers, I learned at different types of patients and I learned their frustration of not knowing how much they will get paid, the frustration of not being able to tell the patient what’s happening, the frustration of faxing the data to the payers or not even knowing who is going to pay for this.

Nan-Wei Gong
There’s a lot of workflow issues in healthcare today, so understanding there are different types of payers, I started like, okay, who has the most to lose? So we really just follow the information and follow the money and find these big larger insurance companies and call them on LinkedIn. So we hired a commercial lead, Scott Sexton through really is a LinkedIn outreach and started pitching the business and realized that he understands the business so much better and has this vision about how it will change his industry. And I hear this from multiple startup companies, that when you build a product and then you find someone that is a sales leader in an industry for like 30 years, when they are willing to quit their jobs and join your company, that means you’re solving a big problem for their industry. 

 
Nan-Wei Gong
And that’s exactly what happened to us. I’m really grateful for the commercial team that they are all extremely experienced and capable in their fields and jumping into a startup to serve the bigger problem that we can solve as a small company.

Brett
Trey, are you involved in sales at all or have you completely transitioned out of founder led sales?

Nan-Wei Gong
And that’s a very good question because I heard also one of our mentors said, if you don’t have to be in a sales call, you have a company. So that’s when we are.

Brett
Amazing. So you’re out of the sales calls then?

Nan-Wei Gong
Out of the sales calls.

Brett
Amazing. What would you say would be your number one piece of advice to a founder who wants to bring technology to market like this doesn’t have to be, you know, selling to the same buyers, but a similar buying group. If you were to give them any advice on how to go to market, what would that advice be?

Nan-Wei Gong
I would say that it’s very easy for a technology founder like myself to think that the doctors are the buyers and they are just not. Similarly, people ask me, how come the sports teams are not paying us millions of dollars? They have a lot of dollars. I was like, have you been to their locker rooms? Or how many pairs of air Jordans do you think Michael Jordan paid for? Like, right. Something that sounds logical, but when you really think through how money, budget and resources are allocated, why would a doctor be in charge of procurement? Right. So it’s really understanding that like your target customers, even though that doctor’s therapist might be the one using it, they’re not the one that’s going to be in the commercial transaction with you.

Nan-Wei Gong
So the type of interviews that I call it detective work for me really is detective work on who makes decisions, who should be signing the contract. It is the top one priority. So if you asked me to give advice to myself a couple years ago, I would say, look for companies that doesn’t have to be in the same space, but similar in concept in terms of the model and study their model. Like, there are companies that are public that’s easy to understand and study. That really helped me with my thinking on understanding different business models. Even though you can see a device company, there are so many different ways to go about it.

Brett
Who were some of those companies that you were inspired by their approach?

Nan-Wei Gong
I would say we’re looking at multiple companies that are public companies, device companies, or just even looking at a product lines in Johnson or Medtronics, and you see how they approach the market in very different ways and understanding how payment and reimbursement works. Just public companies.

Brett
Trey, what’s been the greatest challenge that you faced so far as a leader and as a company? Was it the. That moment that you had to pivot, or what was that moment? You talk to us about that?

Nan-Wei Gong
I think, like, the pivot was definitely a moment, but my philosophy is I like to tell myself that I’m not special. Meaning, you know, 2020 is a difficult year for, I will say, 80, 90% of the company. So definitely not special. But, yeah, I think the biggest challenge is, first is the pivot, and the second is we are bringing technology into a traditionally slow moving, adapt new technology. So it’s a technology driven company in a healthcare environment. So the challenge is just to understand, like, this is not going to be like, to find the right comp. And they said this is the type of company that we’re building. Meaning, like, these are the right metrics we should be tracking as a team, and these are the type of investors that understand this type of business.

Nan-Wei Gong
So is that transition from a tech background into med tech? That’s a big transition for me.

Brett
As I mentioned there in the intro, you’ve raised over 40 million to date. What have you learned about fundraising throughout this journey?

Nan-Wei Gong
Yeah, I learned that, you know, initially, a lot of tech founders will think like a technologist instead of a finance professional. But if you think about a company and fundraising, you are basically selling the company shares as a product. So it’s all about value creation throughout the journey of fundraising is how am I creating values for my shareholders? If you think about it through the lens of that, it’s not about, oh, because YC said this is how much money I should be raising at this stage. At that evaluation, every company is very different. But I see lots of founders trying to put a formula and trying to compare with others, which makes no sense.

Brett
Final question for you. Let’s zoom out three to five years into the future. What’s the big picture vision look like?

Nan-Wei Gong
Yeah, no, we are really on track to disrupt it in this space of having a standard of measurement for musculoskeletal health. So we are already partnered with many big brands, and in three to five years, I imagine us being the standard of care. When you walk into a physical therapist or when you’re going through that therapy that you talked about, that was confusing for you’ll be able to know whether your treatment is working or not with high confidence and communicate the progress with data as opposed to just the best guess from the clinician.

Brett
Amazing. Well, I’ll check back with you when there’s a clinic here in San Francisco that I can go to and check out. My shoulder still hurts. It’s never been healed.

Nan-Wei Gong
You gotta finish therapy.

Brett
Yeah, we are up on time, so we’ll have to wrap here before we do. If there’s any founders that are listening in, they feel inspired and they want to follow along with your journey. Where should they go?

Nan-Wei Gong
They can go to. Your website is Figur8. F I G U R, number eight, tech.com. And that’s our website.

Brett
Amazing. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. Really appreciate it.

Nan-Wei Gong
Thank you, Brett.

Brett
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