proved fruitful in the end with the successful development and commercialization of the Catalys precision laser system and sale of the company to Abbott in early 2014. HCOB: This time you stayed on to integrate the compa- ny, but you didn’t stay long. Why not? Forchette : I find it exhilarating to be a start-up CEO. Abbott is an awesome company, and they already had a great leader. Once I was CEO of OptiMedica, there was no going back. HCOB: Six months later you join Delphinus, another struggling start-up, but this time in an entirely different marketplace — breast cancer screening — that seemingly had little in common with the ophthalmology space you’d occupied your entire career. How’d you come to make that decision? Forchette : The day before I left Abbott to “take a year off,” I was in San Francisco at the Palace Hotel for a Wilson Son- sini conference, and the recruiter I used to hire some of my VPs came up and asked me what I was planning to do next. I told him, “I'm taking a year off to just try and relax.” And he said, “Well, it's a shame you wouldn't move to Ann Ar- bor...” (This was a great recruiting technique — it really set the bait for me). I said, “Who says I wouldn't move to Ann Arbor?” My son was graduating from high school and he was thinking about Michigan, and I'm an absolute car fanatic, so I said, “I might move to Ann Arbor. Why?” He said, “Well, there's this really cool company…” and he started describing Delphinus' technology to me. My mom had breast cancer, so this resonated with me on a very personal level. In addition, the Delphinus product was an innovative water-based system that sounded a lot like some of
HCOB: And once again, your relationship with KPCB came into play, right? Forchette : Yes — relationships are so key. Brook Byers called me said, “Mark, why don't you bring all your research up here to Kleiner Perkins? You and I are going to spend the day together and find your next company.” So, we sat down and went through all the companies on my spreadsheet — including Delphinus. At the end of the day he said, “You know, you spent 25, 30 years in ophthalmology. You've got all these relationships.” I was so prepared to hear him say “You should pick one of these ophthalmology com- panies,” but instead he said, “This breast imaging company Forchette : No. Brook knows that when you have a hy- pothesis about a new technology, it is critical to test it with customers. He said, “ The head of radiology at Stanford is a friend of mine. We're going to have a meeting with him, and I want you to present this opportunity to him, and we’ ll see what he says.” Now, this physician is highly respected, very successful. He has an entire lab of engineers working on a wide range of new technologies, and Brook is a potential investor in many of them. He's not going to B.S. Brook. is really intriguing.” HCOB: That was it?
the technology we developed at Opti- Medica. I’d also met the chairman of the board, Paul McCreadie, and really respected him. The opportunity also met my criteria of a disruptive technol- ogy designed to address an unmet need, with a high caliber core team and great investors. And since I had executed three transactions in ophthalmology, CEO opportunities in that space were begin- ning to pop up on my radar screen. I put them all on a spreadsheet, along with Delphinus, and began looking them over. I wanted to do something super uncom- fortable — that’s what drives me. I like disruptive technologies. I like to go into a market that’s on autopilot and flip it up. I like things that make me sweat.
One reason Mark Forchette decided to become CEO at Delphinus was that the company's innovative water-based system resembled some of the technology he and his team developed at OptiMedica.
4
Powered by FlippingBook