Viz.AI: Improving Access to Stroke Care using AI

[Dr. Bryan Hartley]:
I think that's very important to reiterate. One other thing that I'd like to ask, and this is something that I think if you haven't gone through some type of business or management program. It's a part of the innovation process that I think can be left out if you just start hitting the ground innovating, is the market, the market size, how well you evaluate your market to see if it's a high impact area where you're really going to be able to impact a large number of patients. How important is that, did you already understand this going in, and what did you learn about how important market is when you're trying to get an innovation to commercialization?

[Dr. Chris Mansi]:
So I think the answer is different, depending on which stage of business you're at. I think when you are at the stage where I'm at right now, which is the growth stage, the two things that really matter are how fast you're growing and what is the overall total market that you're addressing. I think when you're raising money from venture capitalists, they are the two things they most care about. In the early days, though, you really don't know exactly what the innovation, the product, the product market fit, the total market size is ultimately going to be, partly because markets change and develop. The Google team, Larry and Sergei, didn't know what search was going to become when they were first starting Google, they just had a better search algorithm. Same thing for, if you look at some of the more recent successes like Slack and Stripe. When they were starting out, people wanted to use what they had, but they didn't know it would become as big as it is today.