David Van Sickle
@dvansickle
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Healthtech builder + producer. Invest Committee @LifeArcVentures . Prev: co-founder/CEO Propeller Health (acq ResMed)
https://davidvansickle.com
Joined November 2008
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Just posted a big update to my respiratory healthtech company list. Thanks for all the suggestions!
This version:
+ 40 companies
+ GPT summary of each
+ tag(s) to categorize business
+ tag(s) for disease target(s)
Link in next + bio
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I still think about this 2018
@NewYorker
profile of
@SkinnerPm
, a former CIA officer turned cop in Savannah, Georgia
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Super interesting mixed methods protocol from
@trishgreenhalgh
et al to explore, longitudinally, the varying day-to-day experiences with remote care technologies
Why do digital solutions that work well in one practice not work at all in others?
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@alexisohanian
Brought my boys there yesterday! It was roasty so we stuck to the shade of the columns
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Excited to work with
@Walgreens
to make things easier for people with respiratory disease
Propeller's My Pharmacy feature, launching first with
@Walgreens
, will allow patients to access pharmacy services directly from our mobile app, making care easier, faster and less stressful.
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tough 24 hours: one friend dx w/ breast cancer, another w/ ALS, + another's kid admit w/ overdose
healthtech:
investors: we've got you! Here's billions for star ratings, insurance schemes, risk stratification, dysfunctional IT!
"So many people working so hard and achieving so
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After ten great years at Propeller, today I’m happy to share I’ve stepped into a new role as an EIR at
@ResMed
- It’s time to start the next journey and build some new things that should exist!
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If you’re a recently laid-off journalist + are interested in investigative research, maybe this can help:
I’m assembling an amazing bench of freelancers doing private competitive intelligence and research reports for digital health / healthtech startups + investors
Pls DM me -
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Startups who've luckily survived 2023: Please make yourself harder to kill in 2024
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Our 11-year-old got his hands on a vintage typewriter, and next thing you know, he's turning out short essays on his favorite soda
@fanta
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Founders need to be continually on the lookout for potential strategic partners (both commercial and financial) and possible acquirers.
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A common mistake startups make when pitching potential partners/acquirers is to use their fundraising deck, which often presents the company (and product) as complete, save for the money needed to grow.
My rule of thumb for this context: Much better if you don't have it all
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If my primary care doctor is any indication, we’re not prepared for the era of
@PeterAttiaMD
and the emerging strategies to quantify and lower long-term individual risk
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TIL
@SocietyHospMed
publishes a series called "Things We Do for No Reason"
It reviews practices that have become common in hospital care but provide little value to patients
This month's issue: Racial adjustments in spirometry
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Thanks to
@Xconomy
for the report about our work with
@AnthemInc
to bring
@PropellerHealth
to people with COPD in Ohio
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Thanks to the WSJ for recognizing the unfairly great people I get to work with
@propellerhealth
We're honored to be named one of the Wisconsin State Journal's Top Workplaces. This award belongs to our team, which gets close to problems, tests solutions and keeps the patient at the center of everything we do.
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Just because one buyer is interested in you doesn’t mean others will be, too
It’s possible, sure. It could also take a lot longer.
My advice to founders with inbound interest: Don’t pass on or screw up an opportunity that would be a great outcome for you and the company
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New data published today from our work with
@DignityHealth
show a significant reduction in asthma-related healthcare utilization
Many ER visits could be avoided with better preventive treatment of asthma. Our new study with
@DignityHealth
demonstrates how.
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Sad to see
@kinsa
shutting down - I always admired the angle they took of aggregating measurements from individuals to open a new window on community public health in real-time
Via
@ExitsOutcomes
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Stepped into a new role today on the early ventures investment committee at
@lifearc
Ventures. Looking forward to helping great teams build better healthcare experiences through technology. Onwards with optimism!
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Chronic respiratory disease receives comparatively little attention from innovators and vanishingly tiny sums from venture investors.
You'd never guess it affects tens of millions of people in the US and costs our country hundred of billions each year in direct medical costs.
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Excited to announce our partnership with and investment from
@aptar
and our big plans for digital medicines
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Great collection of advice for healthtech founders from
@halletecco
about how to approach a sale, and how to increase the probability of a successful deal
Founders, even if you’re nowhere near ready to sell your business, it’s worth thinking about M&A early on. Especially if you have taken money from investors (who expect to get it back, exponentially).
So how do you prepare your company for a successful sale? I talked to four
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How weird that a person with chronic respiratory disease has to carry around hundreds of doses of their medicine all the time.
You don’t want to be caught without a rescue medication when you’re having symptoms, but there are no real alternatives to the classic inhalers. And,
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@chrissyfarr
There’s an extraordinary book by Margaret Locke that you might appreciate: a cross cultural study of menopause in Japan and North America
Sidebar: I wish more people knew the great works of medical anthropology
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After searching unsuccessfully for a month, I made my own list of healthtech companies focused on respiratory health.
This is a handcrafted collection of 95+ companies with short descriptions of their products and more.
A lot of exciting work underway!
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If you run a health system accelerator program, and companies graduate without a workable commercial model, you’re doing it wrong
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Excited to announce our work with Orion today
Orion and Propeller Health partner to bring new digital medicines to people with asthma and COPD:
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Dang, guess
@jaredhecht
and
@usv
are going to get me back at it. Time to start putting some new things into the world again
A lot of entrepreneurs share a similar vision for what achieving the holy grail of personalized healthcare & wellness looks like. Many have different thoughts on how to get there. Is there a right way and what does this all mean?
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An exec team w/ a good one-page map of their business, showing how its components work together to build advantage + value, makes better strategic choices
Maps help a company figure out what's important, and, when done right, change the future of the business (and its past) 🗺
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We in digital health should spend way more time on this
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Since any newsletter links get you demoted on here, I've no idea how to promote a post I wrote this afternoon urging less logic, more magic in digital health... Still, I do hope you'll read it if you're building things
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My boys spotted this help wanted sign at
#osh24
- now arguing “velocity experience” will get them ahead in the job market
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I've recently been helping a growing number of companies who are exploring potential acquisitions
I'm thinking about collecting the most common + valuable lessons - from my own experience and others' - and making a workbook to help guide founders through the process
Something
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Digital health founders -> start conversations with potential strategic partners and investors (corporate venture capital) earlier on and keep them going
@halletecco
making it easier for everyone today with the go-to directory
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In big companies it’s often not build vs buy. It’s build and buy and do nothing, simultaneously
Many big companies we worked with at Propeller were, at any given moment:
• Running internal teams/programs developing competitive products,
• Exploring alternative, overlapping
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There are a lot of healthcare problems that can't be solved forward. Better to start with an ideal end state and work backwards to address them. Sounds obvious, but almost no one does this inversion
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I spoke with two founders recently whose financings have stalled. Their weeks are filled with an exhausting drizzle of lukewarm interest.
In these situations, it sometimes seems the company’s story is working against it. Often these are teams starting to deliver on their promise
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Paperpile
@paperpile
- Organize and manage your collection of references/PDFs
- Easily read + annotate articles in app, and share + collaborate on collections
- Great Chrome and iOS extensions to quickly capture refs
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For all the moaning about my lack of fashion sense, the teens sure do borrow a lot of dad fit
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1️⃣ Take your shortlist of potential partners and add each one to an app like
@Quartr_App
, which is making this easier than ever
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Great story from
@maggieginsberg
in
@madison_mag
about a former Propeller colleague and his two brothers engineering the fastest, longest-range airplane you can build in your garage
@DarkAeroInc
#propeller
-alumni
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Propeller signs another major respiratory partner, Novartis -
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So much is now achievable with atoms that wasn’t just a year or two ago
Yet investment in medical devices has stagnated as a percent of the category and fallen overall
Let's not miss the opportunity to build a new generation of devices tightly coupled to the world-changing
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Today in this. What do you think? Should I go for it?
If you call a founder years after they have sold their company asking to invest or acquire the business you should go straight to jail
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Great work by the
@propellerhealth
team, enabling others to make use of our asthma forecast
Introducing Air by Propeller - free tools to help people across the US see asthma conditions in their area.
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The best businesses emerge from a combination of deliberate and unanticipated opportunities
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In case you missed it: This week I wrote about the "equity prerequisite" - ie, demands that technology first address the social challenges of respiratory health
Link in bio
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Lung cancer kills more men and women each year than the next three deadliest cancers (colon, breast, and prostate) combined. This morning I took a quick look at what's going on in the healthtech world ->
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Which is it: "Make no small plans" or "Riches in niches"?
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Last day of exhibits at ATS - Don't miss the chance to visit Lauren and the team at booth
#2115
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I'd like to see more digital health startups imagining and developing logical integrations with potential strategic partners
When clearly defined, easy to implement, and connected to compelling returns, such arrangements can benefit both companies
They also help the org develop
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Few chronic diseases are marked by such a persistent, frustrating gap in what should have been accomplished by now and what we have actually achieved
Here's my running list of the challenges and opportunities:
34 million Americans live with chronic lung disease. With a few notable exceptions like Propeller Health, why hasn’t there been more entrepreneurial focus and innovation here? Curious for thoughts.
@cwhogg
@VinGuptaMD
@AartikSarma
@panagis21
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College visit trip to SLO and UCSB, my alma mater, today with my middle son. Oddly, first stop on UCSB tour was this goofy lecture hall, where I first battled art history
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New Thanksgiving post about Beatriz da Costa, whose pathbreaking combinations of art and technology, like PigeonBlog, created new ways to annotate and notice the world and ultimately led me to Propeller
(link in profile)
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@ScrivenerApp
Specifically, I'm a big fan of being able to split the editor into two fully-functional windows
That way, I can have an outline, my notes, another section, or even an earlier version of the same section, right alongside (or above/below) the document where I'm writing
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“A complete digital health revolution is likely to take place in asthma care” -
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Unless your company is a wedding band, you’re better off focusing where you have exceptional capabilities 🎯, and not trying to do mediocre covers in every genre.
Bands work when they build a world around a distinctive sound that they create 🎸
As a founder, your role is the
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Latest newsletter going out shortly on the forgotten promise of prevention via digital health, the provocative work of physician-epidemiologist Geoffrey Rose, and our lack of progress in identifying primary risk factors for prevalent chronic diseases
Link’s in my profile. Many
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Eagerly picked up a copy of this new book from
@ChrisWorsham
and
@AnupamBJena
for weekend reading - which promises to be at least partly about natural experiments 🤩
…
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Feels like an echo of the art + engineering projects of people such as Beatriz da Costa
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Heading home, across the ocean, after a great week at
@ResMed
Sydney. Many thanks for such a warm welcome, and productive and enjoyable visit. I’ll miss the lovely setting of Bella Vista!
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I miss Halloween at Propeller ❤️ If I remember correctly, we had a pharma partner visit our Madison office on this day in 2018, and this (some of) what they found 🎃
Happy Halloween everyone! cc
@GregTracy
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We're adding MIR spirometers to our digital respiratory therapy platform
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@halletecco
If it’s helpful, happy to talk with any who might be interested in exploring acquisition about how to encourage / navigate
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How well do you think our current primary care system handles preventive medicine and personal risk reduction?
I’ve been wrestling with this question for the past month after an overdue annual visit and labs left me reflecting on what I expect from my doctor, and wondering how
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Spent last week in London digging into its thriving and impressive healthtech scene 🤩
One of my favorite meetings was a visit to
@entiahealth
led by
@TobyBaseyFisher
. The company recently achieved a world-first with the UK regulatory approval of their at-home complete blood
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Most people have never heard of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), though it takes the lives of 40k people each year in the US. Roughly the same number as breast cancer, except no one talks about it.
As the name suggests, its causes are a mystery. Frustrating and
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New report from
@mqbarrett
and team at
@PropellerHealth
together with colleagues from
@uwmadison
and
@ucberkeley
on the link between air pollution and asthma medication use published this week in
@pnasnews
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Most startups wait far too long to start developing meaningful relationships with potential strategic partners and acquirers.
But acquisition, and commercial partnerships, are just alternative ways of accessing the resources your company needs to grow So while fundraising
Join
@Orthogonal_io
on December 6 for a webinar on how to prepare your med tech company for an acquisition. You’ll hear from Christian Johnson and David Van Sickle as they share lessons learned from their experience as entrepreneurs and industry leaders.
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It's a media apocalypse. More than 20,000 employees have been laid off in the last year. From Washington Post, to Condé Nast, to amazing healthtech reporters and entire teams at some publications
To try to help, I'm assembling a bench of world-class freelancers and journalists
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People don't always know if they're taking their medication properly. Digital medicines do. My
@propellerhealth
colleague David Stempel, MD, outlines new research findings on adherence at
#ERS2018
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So many promising academic spinouts get hung up trying to negotiate workable licensing terms from university tech transfer offices, consuming loads of precious founder energy and cash
Thanks to the work of TenU, there's now a standardized set of terms / recommendations for what
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More people should start companies strictly in a spirit of fun, as a respite from their other work
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Being a dad is 70 percent wandering around the house turning off lights
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I wish LinkedIn profiles showed the person's average response time to email
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AI, but for kids' sports physicals, so we don't have to waste hours on them anymore
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I’m twice the recommended age for SXSW but very much looking forward to this!
Excited to talk digital therapeutics with
@seanduffy
,
@dvansickle
and
@MalinkaWal
at
#SXSW2018
. Vote for our panel.
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very unusual G4 level geomagnetic storm watch issued for tonight
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Beautiful first day of our week hiking town to town on the Via Alpina, descending into Grindelwald from Meiringen
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As a long-time
@readwise
user, I'm excited to try this out on my accumulated history of excerpts and quotes, and explore how it accelerates and sharpens my writing projects
I wrote up a detailed guide for using NotebookLM as a research tool, integrating both web clips and book quotations as sources. Having a single notebook with 7,000 quotes from books I've read over the years has transformed the way I research and write. 🧵⬇️
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