After the first stop of the Greenlight Guru 2023 True Quality Roadshow, Medical Plastics News caught up with Dan Purvis, CEO of Velentium – roadshow sponsors – about how it went.
So, how did the partnership with Greenlight Guru for the road show begin?
Sabrina Casas
As a company that designs develops and manufactures medical devices, we are deeply interested in the industry. We’re also interested in connecting with the people in the industry.
Our business is to take people’s ideas and turn them into reality. The Greenlight platform is pretty solid as a cloud-based platform for quality management and as a result it tends to attract younger companies because it is an out-of-the-box quality management system.
And so, at a roadshow with Greenlight Guru, those younger companies sometimes need engineering discipline from companies like ours and so it's been a really magnificent partnership with them for several years now where our goal is to work with the people that Greenlight already knows and help them be successful and turn their device ideas into commercial reality.
What makes your partnership work?
I'm huge fans of them as a company. I just really like the people there, they have a lot of the same cultural attitude that we have, which is this can-do attitude. I sat with a client yesterday in Minneapolis and I said, “look, we're not going to get it right the first time every time, but here's what I can promise you, we will continue to work stubbornly until we do get it,” and I see that same thing at Greenlight. They are just can-do problem-solving people, which I really like.
Your first stop was Houston was in March, how did that go?
At the Houston stop, I was a featured speaker. I like to interact with people. I'm an electrical engineer by training, but people are my passion and helping entrepreneurs understand how to navigate culture, attract staff, attract funding, navigate problems - that's really where I'm strong and so to interact with the audience around that idea is fantastic.
One of the questions that I got from the audience and I've talked about several times since the roadshow is - is there a point in time as an entrepreneur that you feel like you have made it? It was fun because I could look that guy in the eye and I could say absolutely.
For me, that time was that exact moment. I started Velentium 10 years ago from nothing. I was the first employee. Now there's 130 of us and it continues to grow, but there's that point in time where you go “you know what I think a year from now, this company will still be here whether or not I am”. Not only will Velentium be around, but it's not so founder-dependent and is legitimately established as its own thing, and not just an extension of me.
What was the thought process behind the cities chosen?
For us, most of our clients are either in Minneapolis or one of the coasts. You've got Boston and California as the areas where all this medtech is happening.
Houston is really trying to become the third coast to create medtech. So, I was glad that the Roadshow came here, just because there is a lot of innovation happening here.