Physician Builder Spotlight: Travis Meyer

We’re shining light on MD-entrepreneurs! Each week, we feature an entrepreneurial doctor who’s building a cool product, company, or working on a big idea that you definitely want to know about. This week, meet Dr. Travis Meyer, CEO of Mineral City (more on the company’s mission below!). You can connect further with Travis on LinkedIn.

1. Travis, what inspired you to become a physician entrepreneur? Both of my parents were veterinarians who co-owned their own practice. My undergraduate degree in engineering was fed by my constant desire to figure out how things worked.

When I turned my attention to people and embarked on the physician journey, I knew I loved the intersection of bringing what thoughts were in my head into the real world in a meaningful way. Some do that by running their own physician practice or doing research in academia, but for me, the draw was always making “real world things” that were useful and cool. My sister is also a veterinarian, so we lovingly tease that I’m the one in our family who has it easy … by only treating one species

2. Tell us what your company does and what problem you're trying to solve. I started Mineral City with two physician colleagues to address the clinical problem of plastic and suture-based ortho implants being invisible or poorly visible on imaging modalities. This places limitations on Rads being able to give insights on what is happening with the implants.

One key example is the all suture rotator cuff repair, where the suture tape is invisible to Xray and CT and only shows up as a black line (sometimes) on MRI. The core need was to make the invisible seen and to go one step further by using AI to analyze image patterns and glean some useful information about the item.

We applied the same approach to everyday settings and asked ourselves: If all these security scanners and threat detection X-ray machines (think carry-on airport screening) can look for what’s not supposed to be there… guns, drugs, explosives… why not take that same data, that same image and look for what IS supposed to be there? Using technology and AI to automate verification, authentication, track and trace and supply chain transparency. Mineral City now focuses on using advanced scanning technologies and AI to evaluate goods in bulk and provide real-time feedback on the authenticity, quality and safety of products in the supply chain.

I know people sometimes get uncertain thinking about Xrays and radiation, but to me this is just the next frontier. RFID uses radio waves, very low frequency energy, IR uses shorter frequency, but still longer than visible light, QR code scanning works in the visible spectrum, UV taggants and inks work in the part of the spectrum with shorter wavelengths than visible light, and Xray is just the next space with even higher frequency energy. Much like WiFi, the higher the frequency, the more information you can get.

3. What's your advice to anyone who's thinking about entrepreneurship or a nontraditional career in medicine? Do It! Shortly after Robert Shiller wrote “Irrational Exuberance,” about a decade before he won the Nobel prize in economics, he gave an small lunchtime round table talk at my alma mater and said something I will always remember: “Take the thing you absolutely love, the thing you could do all the time, 7 days a week, the thing you never want a break from… call that #1, take the thing that you really enjoy, that you would do 5 days a week, but take a break from every now and then, and call that #2. Make #1 your hobby and #2 your job, otherwise you’ll never have any hobbies.” I guess I’m at a point where I’m focusing more on my hobby than my job.

The important point is you don’t have to wait to do that…. If you’re fresh out of Med School, or Residency, or have been in practice for 4 decades, if you have a passion and love for entrepreneurship, Do It. Entrepreneurship is not at odds with medicine. You are in service to humanity in both, you are doing valuable things, there aren’t enough of either in the world, and your medical training actually made you very good at many of the things needed to be a successful entrepreneur.

4. How can a physician get over the "start" problem to start a company/organization When we start medicine, there’s a lot about it that we don’t know. The reasons we go into medicine, the things you wrote on your Med School essay, are probably not the reasons you are still in medicine. We start not knowing what the real practice of medicine is like, we start not knowing the true weight of making life and death decisions, we “know” it’s hard work and long hours, but we don’t really know the toll it will take on our families, relationships and ultimately on our own lives. But we start with gusto and excitement, and plenty of butterflies.

This is no different. Medical training has beat out of us the tolerance for uncertainty and replaced it with a compulsive need to find the answers, diagnose the problem, and know how to solve it. But, we still have in us that ability to take risks and have faith. The reasons you start the business won’t be the reasons you still wake up every day and deal with all the challenges of running it in 5 or 10 years, and that’ s OK. You won’t know exactly what it’s like, you won’t know if you can do it (spoiler alert: you can), you won’t know all the answers, just like you didn’t when you started medical school. But you did it once, so you can do it again.

5. What's the #1 lesson you've learned since building your company that wasn't obvious before? How much the first two years of Med School were necessary, and how much I didn’t like them. I wanted to jump right in, see patients, operate, get ‘dirty’… sitting and learning the Creb’s cycle almost broke me. Really, those two years were a foreign language crash course and a peek into all the different things that go into the whole of medicine.

The same is true for business. I thought it would be fun, physical, that I’d be making prototypes and making them better. There was a lot more of a crash course in many foreign languages and learning enough about a lot of other parts of the whole process than I imagined such as accounting, cap tables/equity management, contracts, PR, sales cycles, revenue cycles, cash flow, marketing, investor relations, etc… Those weren’t the things I was particularly excited about. Y

You can’t hire out all the other jobs that need to be done, you have to wear every hat, sometimes many at once. But it does get better. Just like in medicine, you aren’t an intern forever, you will slowly be able to do more and more of the fun things you imagined when you started.

6. Name the top resources you found most helpful to get going.

1. Your Village: It takes a village, so bring them along with you on this journey. Just like when you started med school, everyone was supporting you, rooting for you, and encouraging you. Don’t go it alone. Enlist your village to do the same now, you’ll need those same Tupperware containers full of chocolate chip cookies in the mail from grandma, the same sticky notes on your door saying “good job,” the same late night phone calls home to tell mom you just can’t do it and then wake up in the morning and putting one foot in front of the other.

2) Your Peers: Entrepreneurship is lonely. Think how much you learned from your Med School study mates and friends and not from the textbook. It worked then, it works now. LinkedIn is a great place to find other entrepreneurs in the same space, they aren’t your competition, they’re your wolf pack. Your local small business association can also help. Don’t be shy to tell people what you’re doing and if they’ve done the same, make them a mentor. You can never have too many mentors.

3. Your Team: Cofounders are great. Your core team is important. It’s not personal, its’ business. If some of the initial folks can’t move in the way the company is shifting, then let them exit sooner than later. Listen to your team, take input and respect opinions, then make a decision that is concise and clearly communicated but can change as the situation unfolds. No idea is so great that it can overcome a bad team. People don’t invest in your product or service, especially at the start, in the friends & family stage, they invest in YOU and your team.

7. How can other physicians support you? Let others know how to get in touch. We are always open to investment, connections and opportunities. We are also open to mentors and to mentoring. tmeyer@mineralcityai.com or LinkedIn (email is better).

Connect with Travis on LinkedIn and learn more about his company here.