By: Erika Ghose
It started with an idea in the Stanford Biodesign program in 2014. Nick Damiano and Shreya Mehta spent a year in the program before coming up with the idea for Zenflow. They spent their time finding and evaluating clinical needs in the areas of urology and nephrology until they eventually started generating concepts and screening them based on how much patient impact they could have, while also evaluating the regulatory and reimbursement pathways, stakeholder effects and the other considerations relevant to developing a medical device. That is when Nick and Shreya came up with a concept that they believed had a great chance to radically improve the treatment paradigm for enlarged prostates.
Flash forward to today, and Nick and Shreya have completed their first chronic animal study, closed a seed round, and hired their first full-time employees. So how has Zenflow changed from their initial v1 idea to the present day? Zenflow started as a concept that sounded good in principle, but wasn’t really viable in practice. Still not knowing how to deploy their implant device, the team came up with a temporary hack to use for initial testing. However, it soon dawned on Nick and Shreya that the temporary hack would actually work better than their initial concept. They have now continued to use this as their new design and have only made minor modifications.
Zenflow has come a long way since their days in StartX (Fall ’14 class). When we asked Nick how StartX helped him develop as a founder and as a company he said, “From a distance it can look like everyone in the Valley except you is crushing it, but StartX made us realize that even the best entrepreneurs were going through a lot of the same struggles we were.” He went on to say that the early stages of a company can be lonely and painful as you struggle to gain initial traction, but that having the support of like-minded entrepreneurs in the StartX program really helped him. During his interactions with the StartX community, Nick would often find himself posed with a challenge that had him stumped, but would quickly come out with a viable solution with the help of the community. “The strength of the community is really incredible if you know how to use it, and I think that’s only going to get stronger over time as more entrepreneurs go through the program.”
So what advice can Nick offer to an entrepreneur who is just beginning on their path?
- Try to build something that users love and solves a painful user need. If you don’t meet both of these criteria, succeeding will be an uphill battle, so keep iterating until you get it right.
- You should be laser-focused on building things and talking to users. Everything else is peripheral in the early going. Try to minimize the amount of energy you put into things that don’t directly contribute toward growing your company.
- Try to be as objective as possible. It’s really easy to delude yourself into believing whatever is most convenient. Denying your company’s shortcomings won’t make them go away.
- There’s always more work ahead of you than you think. Keep the long term picture in mind when making decisions.
- Watch your burn rate! Try to get to a point where you could sustain your company even if you never raised another dollar.
It’s certainly easy to lose track of these truths when facing the day-to-day emergencies of entrepreneurial life. But if you stay disciplined and do it right, as Nick and Shreya have relentlessly done over the past couple of years, there’s no limit to how far your start-up can go.
