A Silk Road to Silicon Valley
A local competition turns into a global adventure in entrepreneurship
How the adventure started
As medical innovation speeds up, go to market speed for these technologies is stagnating. It can still take many years to obtain FDA approval — what necessarily accounts for the time spent? Higher volume and demand for more complex analysis are some of the factors leading to regulatory delays. Another key factor is the ambiguity in medical device regulation. From pacemakers, stents, and prosthetics to scalpels, lenses, and rubber gloves, medical devices come in all forms and functions. Because of this diversity, it is difficult to navigate the regulatory maze, forcing companies and consultants to rely on arduous manual research, involved communication, and a little bit of luck to understand and navigate it properly.
Our mission at Anora is to lower these regulatory barriers on innovation by making a process that is easier to navigate. We are working on an intelligent platform that hosts a range of streamlining tools — search functionality, data access, strategic decision support and automation. All these tools have the shared purpose of making it faster and easier to apply for approval.
A Local Competition
The Overseas Talent Entrepreneurship Conference (OTEC) pitch competition receives about 800 startup applications and is hosted in 16 cities around the world. The finalists are invited to Beijing and offered the opportunity to compete for global recognition. When our team at Anora entered the competition at Stanford, we had no clue just how far we’d make it. We simply took the stage, pitched the problem we care most about, and described our vision for a solution. The result? First place in the competition and a free trip to Beijing to compete in the semifinals. Suddenly we had gone global.
Michelle Wu, CEO and founder of Anora and the pitch giver in the local competition, was not able to get her US OPT visa in time to travel to China, so she sent the technical team in her stead — Lead Engineer Ashwin Ramaswami, Product Manager Eric Loreaux, and two technical consultants. The tickets were booked, the itinerary was set, and off the team went to the other side of the globe.
The Finals
In Beijing, the team competed with dozens of other teams from around the world, ranging from Canada to Italy to Israel. It was fascinating to learn about these other ventures and how they were working to solve important problems in a wide range of different verticals. Soon, it was Eric’s turn to take the stage. The highlight of the presentation was a demo of the product, built over a couple months’ time to improve regulatory data access. The product, a simple search engine that mines FDA data and offers a suite of analytics, helped to clarify how these technologies can begin to cut into the inefficiencies in healthcare regulation and ultimately form the components of a comprehensive platform for faster FDA approval. The judges were impressed by our message and our plan forward. We ultimately placed third overall and received a RMB50,000 check for our efforts. We were beyond ecstatic.
The Startup Tours
The competing teams in OTEC were given the opportunity to speak with entrepreneurs and investors in China and tour different parts of the country to gain a better understanding of the nature of the entrepreneurial ecosystem that exists there. We were led through Beijing, Shanghai, and Suzhou, a smaller city to the west of Shanghai with a burgeoning populace and exciting plans for innovation and development. Throughout these tours, the team was given more opportunities to pitch and hear from other startups as they gained a global understanding of the entrepreneurial spirit that exists in so many different countries around the world.
Key Takeaways
For our young team, this trip was a pivotal moment in our professional lives. We learned that an idea can reverberate on the other side of the world, and that there are people beyond our small scope working on incredible ideas as well. Innovation can happen anywhere, and although there is currently an uneven distribution of resources and favorable environments to foster innovation, this is rapidly changing. As the world becomes more and more connected, exciting startups like ours will have the potential to conquer larger scope problems, but in order to do so, we must understand and master all of the subtleties and nuances that underlie different cultural markets. As we have seen in our own work in healthcare regulation, differences between systems, if not properly managed, lead to severe procedural inefficiencies. If we can conquer these differences, treatments and technologies will be able to flow more freely between markets. After everything we have learned and experienced, one thing is clear: Anora is headed in an exciting direction.
