Venture Valkyrie

Let Sleeping Dogs Lie

Lisa Suennen — Thu, 17 May 2012 03:06:52 +0000

Back in February I chaired the IBF’s Consumer Health and Wellness Innovation Summit. When I wrote about it on my blog, I closed by describing a tongue-in-cheek conversation I had with a fellow investor about how the company pitches kept veering to the pet food/service market. To excerpt myself:

As I and my table-mate, a well-known medical device investor, watched a presentation about FitBits and other devices for tracking fitness, he leaned over to me and said, “Now I bet there’s a pet market for that too,” suggesting that people would fork over plenty of cash to put a step tracker on Rover’s collar.

So it turns out this guy was more prescient than we both thought, as today I have seen it all. It’s not bad enough that actual humans are running around wired for sound with so many devices that there is a rapidly growing market for Batman utility belts, but lo and behold, Fujitsu is launching a “smart dog collar” that is, for all intents and purposes, a FitBit for Fido, complete with smart phone data access. God help us all.

Today in Mashable, the … (read the rest)

What’s Done Cannot Be Undone

Lisa Suennen — Sun, 13 May 2012 00:18:09 +0000

Shakespeare’s play MacBeth opens with two witches uttering these words:

“When shall we three meet again? In thunder, lightning, or in rain?

“When the hurlyburly’s done, When the battle’s lost and won.”

The quote refers to the impending reunion of three sister witches intent on evil, but it struck me as a great metaphor for what the outcome of current efforts to reform healthcare must accomplish: the re-connection of incentives, both clinical and financial, among the three most critical constituents of our healthcare system: patients, payers and providers. If these incentives do not align, or meet again soon, as a result of seismic shifts underway, the U.S. economy is probably doomed to collapse under the financial weight of our current healthcare system dysfunction.

In fact, MacBeth felt like a completely appropriate metaphor to me as I contemplated what is going on within the medical device industry while I attended last weeks’ IBF MedTech Investing conference. The conference took place in Minneapolis, considered by many to be the ancestral homeland of much of today’s medical device industry. Minneapolis is not exactly Scotland (witness complete lack of hills), but it … (read the rest)

Avengers Assemble! Prepare to Defend Your Healthcare Coverage

Lisa Suennen — Thu, 03 May 2012 17:38:46 +0000

I happened upon a pretty funny healthcare piece on FunnyorDie.com, the comedy website owned by Will Farrell and other comedians and venture capitalists. It is unusual to think about a group that includes people from those two professions joining together; I am guessing such a coalition works since the phrase most often heard by venture capitalists from their portfolio CEOs is, “You must be joking!

Anyway, the piece is entitled Avengers Assemble and it is a short film (4 minutes) during which the Avengers gather at their corporate conference table to discuss the new healthcare reform law. For those of you who are not 12-year-old boys or Marvel comics aficionados, the Avengers were an elite force of superheroes who banded together to fight evil. It is an almost perfect metaphor for those who think that is what the Patient Protection Act was meant to do and just a funny premise in any event.

In the film, Tony Stark, CEO of Stark Industries and also known as Iron Man, is overseeing the discussion, which includes Avengers’ members Captain America, the Hulk, the Wasp, Thor, Hawkeye, Wolverine, and a host of others, … (read the rest)

War is Hell

Lisa Suennen — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 14:02:03 +0000

The basic problems facing the world today are not susceptible to a military solution. –John F. Kennedy

Despite what JFK once said, it seems that the way our American culture faces into crises is by declaring war against the perceived perpetrator. Even when no guns are fired or troops deployed, we have adopted the language of war as the way to demonstrate we are serious about domestic problems, particularly those that have a highly damaging effect on our right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. As such, we have fought wars on communism wars on drugs, wars on terrorism, wars on taxes and now it appears we are in the process of declaring an all-out war on obesity. Cue the Battle Hymn of the Republic:

Glory, glory Hallelujah, Trade your tater tots for tuna, Better quit the foods that screwed ya, Or you’ll be passing on!

During the past week I have been inundated with examples of the coming preparations for battle. It started with an opportunity I had to introduce a panel at a conference hosted by Health Evolution Partners. The panel featured Microsoft Health Solutions … (read the rest)

Breaking Research: Beer Makes Men Smarter, Women Make Men Stupider, World Achieves Equilibrium

Lisa Suennen — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 23:52:54 +0000

Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. –Benjamin Franklin A woman drove me to drink and I didn’t even have the decency to thank her. –WC Fields If you are a man, then I’m about to rock your world in a good way. A recent study by researchers at the University of Illinois, Chicago has confirmed what men have claimed all along: beer makes men smarter. I know what you’re thinking: “I didn’t know Homer Simpson was a researcher at University of Illinois!” Homer, of course, has been credited with saying, “Alcohol, the cause and solution to all of life’s problems.” In order to provide happiness to men everywhere, the University of Illinois researchers devised a bar game in which 40 men were given three words (those three words were not “Come here often?”) and told to come up with a fourth that fits the pattern. For example, the word “cheese” could fit with words like “blue” or “cottage” or “Swiss.” Half the players were given two pints of beer. The other half got nothing. The result was that those who had downed … (read the rest)