Carl has worked in the medical/medical device arena for over 40 years. He supported his way through undergraduate school working as an x-ray technician at El Camino Hospital. In addition he supported his way through graduate school working at Stanford in cardiovascular medicine.
His undergraduate training is in Microbiology and Biochemistry. His graduate degrees are in Electrical Engineering/Computer Science and an MBA, both from the University of Santa Clara.
After graduate school and a short period working for Hewlett-Packard’s medical business group, Carl began an unanticipated excursion into becoming a medical device entrepreneur. With John Simpson, MD, PhD, and Ray Williams, Advanced Cardiovascular Systems (ACS) was formulated and was Carl’s first entrepreneurial effort. Needless to say ACS was very successful, the company was sold to Lilly in 1984 and spun-off into Guidant in 1994. ACS became the University of Medical Devices for Silicon Valley, giving birth to over 100 medical devices companies. Recently Guidant has been sold to Boston Scientific and Abbott Vascular.
ACS created the experience, motivation and entrepreneurial drive to launch into a career of working with other entrepreneurs in establishing over 16 medical device companies. Carl is on the board of multiple medical device companies and has in process several more in the making. In addition, he worked with Versant Ventures for four years learning the VC business while assisting them in defining new companies for future investments.
In the future Carl’s plans are to continue focusing on serial entrepreneurship, but with a higher focus on mentoring young entrepreneurs just out of college or starting their first companies. With multiple start-up companies under his belt, understanding the VC business models, and 40 years of operational and clinical experience, Carl is uniquely situated to accomplish these goals with key collaborations with early ‘start-up’ venture capitalists and angel investors. The vehicle to accomplish these goals will be an incubator called Coronis Medical Ventures.