Adam Torres and Bill Carpou discuss the Cardiovascular Tech Forum.
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Show Notes:
Listen to the Cardiovascular Tech Forum coverage. In this episode, Adam Torres interviews Bill Carpou, CEO at Octane. Explore Octane and the Cardiovascular Tech Forum.
Watch Full Interview:
About Bill Carpou
Significant executive, operational and sales experience at premier technology and private equity firms. Bill is currently the CEO of Octane, an organization that plays a leadership role in fostering innovation by providing companies with capital and growth resources for Southern California’s technology and life sciences sectors. Prior to Octane, Bill worked at the private equity firm Blackstone as an operating partner. Bill is also a general partner and the founder at Visionary Ventures, a high performing later stage VC fund, a general partner of Elevation Ventures, and holds board positions at Priveterra Acquisition Corp. II and Mobix Labs Inc.
About Octane
Octane is a convening organization of the Southern California technology and medical technology business ecosystem. Octane hosts dozens of programs throughout the year and has direct access to capital and partners. We believe that action focused locally has an impact globally.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to mission matters.com and click on Be Our Guest to Apply. All right, so today I am in Newport Beach, California and I am at the.
Cardiovascular Tech Summit. And let me tell you the tech forum and I’m having all kinds of fun. And I was able to snag the CEO of, of Octane for, for a quick interview. I know you’re busy, but Bill, but thank you. And welcome on the show. Welcome to Newport beach. I’m glad you were able to make it. Oh man.
So I saw you on stage this morning and you were talking about, correct me if I’m wrong. I think this is the third year for the conference. This is year number three for, for cardiovascular. Yeah. And year over year, this thing’s been growing. I’ve heard of some participants that have come back, now this is their second year or some of them even their third year.
What do you attribute some of the success of this particular conference to? Well, you know, I think we’ve built this off of platforms that we’ve used for years. So we’ve you know, we just completed our twelfth year in ophthalmology, our fifth year in medical aesthetics. So it’s been basically the same kind of format.
It’s the same playbook. So, you know, I think what we could do is accelerate these things much faster than, you know, we had when we first started it with, with simply ophthalmology. You know, I think the reputation of octane and the great board that we put together you know, for, for planning the cardiovascular tech forum, you know, we were able to really reach out to great investors, great leaders, you know, across the, across the industry.
So word got out pretty quickly. And you know, we grew, I, I think from year one to two, we basically doubled audience and we, and we increased from last year to this year, probably about 40%. Yeah. And for those at home, maybe that, that aren’t familiar with Octane, maybe give a little bit of the, of the history of the background of the company.
Yeah. So, you know, I’ve been, I’ve been here nine years. The CEO. The organization is actually 22 years and it was started by a variety of executives here. One of them being Mike was solemn was well known, obviously, here in cardiovascular. And I was just listening to him speak. But it was put together 22 years ago on the, you know, the intent was convening, bringing together all those facets of the innovation industry in Orange County.
You know, since then, we’ve really grown. We, you know, currently today, we’ve got five different areas that we focus on. And one is these events like you like you’re seeing today. And, you know, we, I always say we’re not an events company, but we are. And we are in the fact that this is where we show.
showcase the companies that have come through our accelerator, the investors that we have and the innovation and the ideas. So that’s one number two is we have an accelerator. So we work with about 70 companies a year and help prepare them for institutional funding. Then the third is we have a platform.
That enables us to help these companies raise capital. Mm-Hmm. and all the resources that go to make that company successful. Yeah. So it’s not good enough just to raise capital. You need to do, know what to do. Mm. And be smart with that. Then we have an AI analytics platform. Mm-Hmm. You know, rather new.
Yeah. And then, and then the fifth is really the impact to the community. So we’re very community oriented. We were a very unique nonprofit, but. You know, I’d say our north stars as high paying job creation. But in addition to that, it’s really just economic development and, you know, fostering collaboration across the entire southern California region, not just Orange County.
Now you mentioned earlier and then I could be off the number. So correct me on this one. But you work with about 70, but you’re looking at about 500 or so companies here. Like what? What goes into that kind of decision making process? Yeah, we so we we see about 5 to 550 companies a year that will have an interest in joining the accelerator.
We end up working with 65 to 70. You know, that that seems to be the number over the last couple of years. There’s a lot of things that drive that. One is that this particular program, the Accelerator, it’s supported by a grant from the SBDC, and so the resources we have Only really permit us to do about 65 or 70 companies.
You know, that’s number one. But it’s, it’s pretty easy to diligence them down. I mean, about half of them just aren’t in the right industries. They’re way too early or it’s simply a bad idea. You know, so, you know, let’s just use two of, I’m sorry, 500. We go from 500 to 250 pretty quickly. And then we meet with those companies and we get that down to about 125.
And then we get really granular from that standpoint. And that’s where we select that. That’s 70 number. Yeah. And you mentioned you, you, you showed this very nice slide earlier about raising capital and just the type of capital that’s been risen by some of, some of the recent companies. Yeah. And those were some big numbers.
I’m, I don’t even remember the slide, but there was a lot of Bs. I don’t know if you, I don’t know if you remember. So you were in there watching actually, right? I was watching them. That’s what I’m telling you. I was watching. Yeah. So, so if you just, you know, if you just look at the Octane Portfolio companies We’ve helped them raise it is since about well in 2012, we’ve helped them raise about 8.
4 billion dollars. Yes with a B And that’s what I said when I heard that in the in the I was sitting down and last year alone 2023 was just under a billion. It was like nine hundred and 47 million I believe it was something like that What do you attribute some of that success to? Like, what do you attribute some of that?
Of course the companies, I get that. But I think there’s something special about Octane and the people being brought together. Like, it’s unique. I cover a lot of conferences and not everybody’s given numbers like that. Yeah, well, this is an ecosystem. I mean, if you look at it, Octane on its own is an ecosystem.
Yeah. But it’s a part of a much bigger ecosystem is the way I like to look at it. So, you know, So I think as you look at that, yes, part of it is the diligence and what we go through. So you know, we’re selecting what we feel are the best companies to go through the process. But then it’s the, it’s the support.
It’s the incredible support that we get from the advisors that are really mentoring because our, our accelerator is more mentoring than it is something else. It’s not, it’s not giving them space and they could just hang out because companies are a little bit more advanced from that anyway. And they’ve pretty much got that.
So what we’re doing is we’re providing them access to a variety of advisors and mentors that could work with them and help them get FDA approval, help them get regulatory, help them in commercialization, manufacturing, any of those things. So I really think it’s the ecosystem that’s built around Octane that enables us to have such a successful exit of companies that come out of the accelerator.
And the AI side of things, I know that you mentioned that was a relatively new, like, like, what, what can you share on that at this point? Well, you know, there’s two things there. One, one is that we’ve got an actual product now called Haystacks. And it’s a rather unique product. It was created about a year ago.
We’ve commercialized it for about nine months now. So we license it. And the market is very niche. The market is other investors, you know, not individual, but, but, you know, V. C. Or institutional V. C. Corporate V. C. So that’s one. It could be family offices, and it could also be other accelerators. And so what haystacks and kind of the pun intended is you find the needle in the haystack.
Yeah, I got that. But it’s S. T. A. X. At the end. And so what it enables us to do is we’ve gone back and we’ve we’ve captured 40 data points on every company that’s come through. Interesting. So, about 2, 000 companies, 80, 000 data points. And historically, we rank these on a scale of 1 to 4. We’d add them up, divide by, divide by 40, say 3.
8, you must be doing really good. And that served us really well. And directionally, it was very accurate. However, a couple of years ago, two years ago we did a regression analysis. Actually, this was done by an intern. And They went back and said, you’re using each of these 40 as if they have an equal I can see which ones were more significant, more important, put a little bit more emphasis on them.
And now we, we, Oh, we could take a company that comes out of our accelerator. And by the way, again, we licensed this to others that they
Tool, there’s a 92 percent probability that I’m going to be successful and success measured by the fact that you know, one, it’ll go on to raise the round that they’re in and two, that it will be an operating entity. So the success measurement is not about how big an exit that you’ll have. So that’s amazing.
First off, that’s highly interesting. And to use that data and to use those data points in that history, like I’ve heard, I’ve done, I don’t know, probably like 10 interviews so far today and hearing the way that data is being used to solve real world problems and applied It’s interesting. You know, it’s never been more important.
I think, you know, data, data directs us. We follow the data. You know, but if you, if you look at it, it’s really, it’s really significant because when you’ve got companies that frankly don’t have revenue and certainly don’t have earnings. Yeah. Then, you know, You’re left as an investor to just go on your gut feel.
And you know, I don’t know, I don’t know if you have, but I’ve made mistakes with that. We all have, because we fall in love with the story. We fall in love with the entrepreneur and nobody’s intentionally misleading. It was just, they’re so passionate about their company and about where they’re going with it that, you know, you just go, wow, this is great.
Let me throw money at it. And so, you know, we’re trying to, we’re trying to provide the data that says, okay, look at this. You could. You know, at, at, at some point you wanna put whether I trust the CEO E or the, or the founder, whether I like them, whether I could work with them. Mm-Hmm. , that’s all great, but data will drive you to that decision.
Mm-Hmm. And so, you know, at the end of the day, you’re gonna make a much much more realistic. Mm-hmm and less risky investment decision. Yeah, makes total sense. Looking into the rest of the year for Octane in general, not just CardioVascular Tech Forum, which we’re at today, like what’s on the agenda?
So, you know, we’ve got a, we’ve got a year full of events. We’ve got in two weeks, we’ve got our high tech awards. So that’s kind of like the you know, the Grammys or the Golden Globes or whatever you want to call it of innovation. So it’s a night of celebrating innovation. across Orange County. Then we end our programming in the year on October 8th and 9th with our Medical Innovation Forum.
So the Medical Innovation Forum pulls all the different disciplines in, not just cardiovascular, not just, as I mentioned before, we do ophthalmology and aesthetics. That’s, yeah, that’s, it’s a more general conference. So, you know, you’re going to get a little bit of a different audience, but Because, you know, what we have here today is everybody is associated and everybody is in cardiovascular to some extent.
And then comes January, we start it all over again with aesthetics and ophthalmology and, you know, a, you know, full innovation week, which we do that in the spring. Well, Bill, this has been a lot of fun. I know you got to get back to the conference. I do. Last thing Octane. If somebody wants to learn more, how do they do it?
OctaneOC. org. You know, that’s our website. You could look at anything that you want on that. The other thing to access is access, when you see that, our impact report. Our impact report is probably the best tool that gives somebody a good overview of what we do. Fantastic. And for everybody that’s watching, just so you know, we’ll put the links to that in the website so that you can just click on the links and head right on over.
And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with Mission Matters and you haven’t hit the subscribe button yet, we welcome you hit that subscribe or follow button. This is a daily show each and every day. We’re bringing you new content, new coverage, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way in your journey as well.
So again, hit that subscribe or follow and Bill again. Appreciate you coming on. Thanks very much for having me. Thank you. Okay, take care.