Serial Health Tech Builder on Founder Skills That Actually Matter — From Artificial Wombs to Injectors

When you're building something new in healthcare, the instinct is to lock down requirements and ship fast. Eric Sugalski has spent his career proving why that's a mistake. Eric's journey started with a dream job at IDEO, where he fell in love with the messy, human-centered process of turning ideas into real products. He later went on to found his own design and development firm, spending fifteen years helping health technology founders bridge the gap between lab  breakthroughs and market-ready products - including work on an artificial womb for premature infants and a wearable airbag that prevents hip fractures in the elderly. In this conversation, Eric talks about why he thinks the MVP mindset is "fatally flawed" in medtech, what it was like to use his wife's pregnancy as a nine-month countdown to launch a company, and why he sold the firm he'd built for a decade and a half to finally build his own medical device: a drug delivery system designed to make one of healthcare's most error-prone manual processes as simple as removing a cap. Whether you're an engineer, a founder, or just someone who's ever wondered what it takes to bring a health technology from napkin sketch to patient bedside, this episode is okay, great. Super helpful. Appreciate it. I love the episode description you put together. No edits. Can you go ahead and put together the one sentence summary for my podcast distributor platform, a list of tags separated by commas for you. Subscribe to First in Human: - Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/first-in-human/id1842644737 - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3C1xG5SxPei8m2lI63WSkd Connect with Eric on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/esugalski/Visit Ampulis's website: https://ampulis.com/