Three Hurdles to Medical Device Adoption: Interview with Esperto Medical CEO Aditya Rajagopal

In this episode of Medsider Radio, we sat down with Aditya Rajagopal, co-founder and CEO of Esperto Medical.Esperto is a Caltech spin-out utilizing compressed sensing technology with ultrasound to continuously and non-invasively measure blood pressure.Before Esperto, Aditya co-founded ChromaCode, a molecular diagnostics company, and was a researcher at Google[x], where he worked on novel medical imaging methods. Aditya also serves as part-time faculty at Caltech and USC, and holds BS, MS, and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from Caltech. In this interview, Aditya discusses why great science doesn’t necessarily make great companies, what it takes to win as a fast-follower in medtech, and how to sequence a platform technology without spreading resources too thin.Before we dive into the discussion, I wanted to mention a few things:First, if you’re into learning from medical device founders and CEOs and want to know when new interviews are live, head over to Medsider.com and sign up for our free newsletter.And if you’re ready to level up your medtech game, you should check out Medsider Courses — 8-week masterclasses covering topics like fundraising, M&A and exit planning, design and development, clinical and regulatory strategy, and commercialization.These courses, featuring hard-earned lessons from elite medtech CEOs, can be purchased individually or come free with our All-Access Pass.If you'd rather read than listen, here's a link to the full interview with Aditya Rajagopal, which includes a link to ScottBot — an AI version of host Scott Nelson trained on every Medsider interview and playbook. Feel free to ask ScottBot any questions you'd like!KEY MOMENTS FROM THE INTERVIEW(02:44) - Aditya’s journey from Caltech and Google to tackling one of medicine's hardest engineering problems at Esperto (05:17) - How Esperto is trying to solve a 50-year-old problem: continuous blood pressure monitoring without an arterial catheter (07:17) - Why Esperto was okay with being a fast-follower in an established market instead of creating a new one (16:12) - "Great science doesn't necessarily make great companies" and other lessons Aditya learned at ChromaCode (24:02) - Three hurdles every medical device must clear before clinicians will actually adopt it (27:44) - How Aditya determines whether a technical problem actually has a "there there" (37:51) - Esperto’s pitch strategy and how it raised from a position of strength (43:18) - What first-time founders often misunderstand about how venture capital actually works