This week, we're featuring OIE mentor Gary Grenter, Principal Consultant at Alpha-Flow Management Consulting. Spanning a 35+ year career, Gary has held executive level positions focused on medical technology startups, bringing a one-a-kind expertise to his mentoring at OIE.
Gary, who now leads his own consulting firm, works consistently with a handful of early-stage ventures to coach them on lean startup and operations. All of which focus primarily on health and dental technology. However, early in his career, Gary worked at global companies such as Stryker and Bausch and from there, entered the fast-growing startup space by moving to Silicon Valley.
One of his most successful endeavors was at an electrical stimulation medical company, Bioelectron, where he led the company to a 400% increase in sales and profitability, subsequently selling it to their largest competitor for $100 million. After, Gary assumed the position of CEO at Kyphon where he successfully took the company public.
However, Gary notes his entrepreneurial journey endured many bumps along the way and has learned the importance of customer discovery, a key pillar of OIE’s teachings.
“Really taking care of your customer and understanding what your customer wants has always been a passion of mine,” Gary says this key lesson is what led him to co-found his last startup, Theragen, in 2014. Theragen creates non-invasive technologies that deliver therapeutic energy to the body to treat pain and disease and heal tissue.
Shortly after leaving Theragen in 2017 and starting his own consulting company, he met Bob Smith and began mentoring in the Innovation Commercialization Assistance Program (ICAP), which provides guidance and support to teams as they work to achieve key milestones of the startup process using the Lean Startup method. Gary joined OIE’s Mentor-in-Residence (MIR) program in 2021, helping to expand the initiative by sharing his deep expertise in the startup ecosystem.
“I love working with teams. I love working with entrepreneurs…I love the energy around entrepreneurs and helping them get started,”
Gary enjoys engaging with the many facets of OIE, from supporting our international initiatives like our Tech Frontier program with the Korean Innovation Center to contributing to classroom modules in the GW Medical School and guiding teams through the New Venture Competition.
“I’ve been in their shoes, I’ve been an entrepreneur and so I think I can empathize with them…”
Gary highly recommends incoming students take advantage of our Mentor-in-Residence program, whether you are just interested in developing your entrepreneurial skills or have a business idea. “That’s what we’re here for. That’s what we do and let us help.”