Entrepreneurship in Utah: Blackrock CEO Andy Gotshalk (Part 2)

Andy Gotshalk: I also started taking some classes and thought about the idea of going to business school full-time. I never went back to business school so to this day, I still don’t have an MBA. I did take some key classes along the way, which provided a good foundation for me. The biggest thing that you’re going to get out of a business school is the network. The actual coursework is a critical piece of it, but you can pick that up from many different places. I took some classes to give me more of that foundation and continue to grow with the company.

An interesting side-story about me that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with business or entrepreneurship is in 2003, there was a restructuring going on in Haemonetics. They laid off a decent amount of the work force. But I didn’t get laid off. I had the opportunity to talk to the people there and coordinate getting laid off for a nice severance package that allowed me and my wife to travel the world. I decided to leave and travel for a year mostly to developing countries around the world. It also helped me think a little bit more about what I wanted to do and where I wanted to be. That was in 2003.

Then in 2004, I realized that I wanted to have even more of an impact. I wanted to really be involved in companies earlier on and bring new technologies to market to improve patient’s lives. At that point, I started networking and tried to figure where I could go and what I could do. There was this person that I had known from my days at Haemonetics. He was the CEO of a company called Cyberkinetics. They had started in 2002.

They were trying to develop a neuro prosthetic device. This was going to be a tiny chip that was going to be implanted in a paralyzed patient, understand what that patient was trying to do, and then execute those actions for them through an exoskeleton and stimulators through their own muscles. I thought of it as unbelievable technology, innovative, and almost science fiction like. That was something that I really wanted to be a part of.

At that point, the company was knee-deep in a clinical trial. I wasn’t going to help in a clinical trial. I’m a commercialization and operations guy. There wasn’t an opportunity for me in the clinical trial piece. I didn’t have that kind of a background. The agreement I had with the CEO was, “When we hit enough milestones to commercialize this product, I can have a running start. In the interim, we’ve got this technology. If you want, you can continue to sell this technology to animal researchers around the world. You’re going to have very little budget to do anything different to the technology.” I took that.

We pretty much grew that business from zero to close to a million dollars per year. It was great. My key thing there is how important it is to get to revenue. I was fortunate that these products were somewhat already developed. This was in 2007 and 2008. The company achieved some of the milestones but not enough to truly be able to commercialize this product. The existing investors didn’t have an appetite to go through another round and the capital markets weren’t that favorable at that point in time. So, they needed to shut shop.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Entrepreneurship in Utah: Blackrock CEO Andy Gotshalk
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