Deep pockets and lengthy timescales
Podcast transcription - 4th September
Peter Cowley: Welcome again to another Invested Investor podcast. Today, we have Martin Frost, who is CEO of CMR Surgical, which was Cambridge and Medical Robotics. Martin, welcome. Let's talk up through till when you start to become entrepreneurial.
Martin Frost: I'm Mancunian, from the north of England, like you, Peter. Did a history degree at Cambridge. Last time I did science was when I was 15, so I think it's fair to say it's a surprise to those teachers who taught me physics and chemistry all those years ago, that I'm now running a technology company in Cambridge. That's a big surprise. But I was very much on the arts side. So history, languages for me were important. Frankly, left Cambridge and didn't really know what I wanted to do at that point. Went back to Manchester, trained as an accountant, ACMA qualified, and then very quickly joined a broad-based engineering company at that time, which gave me fantastic experience.
Peter Cowley: Was that up north then?
Martin Frost: That was up north. It's in a company called Simon Engineering, which was a diverse engineering business actually. They used to build the ladder tiles that went on the back of fire engines. They were a huge management contractor. Big civil engineering projects and big in environmental services and it was that environmental services business that took me and ultimately my family out to France where I lived for a year, and then out to America where I lived for three years. And in all of that process it was the early days of management information systems and I discovered that actually I was quite good at writing software.
Martin Frost: So, I was responsible for writing all, of the management executive information systems that Simon used at that time. And that meant that essentially it just added another string to my bow. IT, finance, languages is a great combination.
Peter Cowley: And this was the early 90's by then was it?
Martin Frost: This was early '90s. Back to the UK. A couple of years as finance director of a big part of GC Marconi and discovered that whilst the rigour and discipline of GC Marconi taught me a lot, I found the culture inhibiting at that time. And then was recruited initially to become CFO of a business then called Scientific Generics group in Cambridge in the mid to late '90s by some wonderful people who still count amongst the people who have taught me most in business. Gordon Edge, Peter Hide, Bob Pedigree. Fantastic mentors and leaders.
Peter Cowley: So that brought you back into Cambridge after a ten, year gap or something?
Martin Frost: It did. Late 90's. Scientific Generics was a very broad based consulting, intellectual property exploitation business.
Peter Cowley: And you stayed about a decade. So, why did you leave? What was the next thing that drew you onwards?
Martin Frost: I was there a decade. People there were fantastic and still are fantastic, but my passion was on the spin out IP exploitation model and probably 80% of the people at Sagentia were involved essentially in the consulting part of the business. It was important, but it wasn't my particular passion, so that's a big reason why I left. The other reason is, and a learning point here is that at the time it was around hundred million pound market cap business, actually quite complex business, both as a P&S business and a balance sheet business and to have a business that's actually that small in the context of London stock market and needing to explain to investors, we had an asset management business with investments. We had a P&L account generating profits from the consultancy. That's just too difficult in a business with that market cap.
Peter Cowley: Was it pulled off the market later?
Martin Frost: It's still on the market. But we certainly asked ourselves whether the market was the right place to have that business. And it was really on the outturn of those conversations that I decided actually what I really wanted to do is to get involved in businesses on my own account and grow them and be responsible for them. Good and bad.
Peter Cowley: So, did you then become an entrepreneur? Did you form your first business?
Martin Frost: I did. It's banded around a lot. The word entrepreneur. I sort of call myself a businessman more than an entrepreneur. I think mostly because everything I've done has always involved other people. It's never, for me been a one man show, CMR Surgical is not a one man show. So it was always a question for me of finding the right people to work with and to grow businesses with. And I've had lots of fun, some success and learned also for some things that didn't go well.
Peter Cowley: I think entrepreneurs need to be in teams anyway, two or three people. And I think the entrepreneur part of it as opposed to the business part of it is the risk you're willing to take. So did you take a whole chunk of risk after you left?
Martin Frost: Yes, absolutely. So certainly think I did. I think there was probably a two year period where, you know, it didn't receive an income at all. You have to be prepared to do that as an entrepreneur. So at that time was involved in starting two to three separate businesses, two of which are still absolutely alive and Yes, we'll see. I'm still a shareholder in them.
Peter Cowley: Okay. So there's about six years, now, before you joined CMR, any particular companies you want to talk about during that period?
Martin Frost: Yes, I think the big theme in my life before medical devices, surgical robotics was mobile money. Mobile money has transformed the lives of 17, 18 million people in Kenya. What a lot of people don't know is that the technology behind them, Pesa, which is the name of the mobile money service in Kenya, all of that technology was created, built, rolled out, supported from Cambridge and it has transformed lives. A lot of money was made in the consultancy business at that time and RedCloud now takes that torch on as its own product business.
Peter Cowley: Are you a founder of that?
Martin Frost: Yes I was co-founder of that business Yes.
Peter Cowley: Okay, let's move forward to the business you're involved with now. Has some wonderfully exciting growth.
Martin Frost: Yes it does.
Peter Cowley: The CMR came into medical robotics.
Martin Frost: I got involved with co-founder of the CMR Surgical 18 months before the company was sort of incorporated, started. That's actually how all these companies start because we had some fantastic ideas about what we'd like to do in this space, informed by already what was a very clear market need, which for the benefit of listeners who have millions of people who don't get the right sort of surgery all around the world. Yes, we've had thoughts around that.
Martin Frost: We have good relationships with surgeons up and down this country. Recognise the need for a versatile, affordable, effective tool that goes in the hands of the surgeon and the operating room, but the difficulty we had was in order to take that business to where we had a prototype that could then prove we could build a business out of it, that prototype needed millions of pounds. This is one of the most advanced pieces of medical device equipment in the world and although personally I'd already raised before that time, probably just shy of a hundred million pounds in terms of different businesses I'd been involved in around Cambridge, actually the tasks to finance this business, was probably the hardest of them all, which is ironic. Sitting here today. Now we've raised probably $150 million.
Peter Cowley: And the first round was angel round?
Martin Frost: The very first round was an angel round. Looking back on it and now Luke Has, co-founder was a particularly friendly with a local author, Sophie Hannah and Sophie was good enough on the basis of relationship established around piano lessons and singing lessons, would you believe, to put some money into the business. And not a very small amount of money either. It's probably one of the best investments she's ever made.
Peter Cowley: Was she the only investor at that point?
Martin Frost: As an angel other than the founders, she was.
Peter Cowley: She put money in, and Luke put some money in?
Martin Frost: Yes.
Peter Cowley: Okay.
Martin Frost: That took us to what I would say the grownup seed round of the company in January 2014 which is sort of four and a half plus years ago now when we brought into the business, essentially Norwegian family office money at that time.
Martin Frost: So notably not British. And that's not withstanding the fact that I had good relationships with many venture capital companies, asset management, equity, private equity houses. Yet it took us 12 months to raise that money.
Peter Cowley: How much was that?
Martin Frost: That was just over three and a half million pounds.,
Peter Cowley: Primarily from the Norwegian family?
Martin Frost: Pretty much 90 odd percent of it from that source, and we took a very pragmatic view to that round. We recognised that in order to build what we always wanted to be a big business in Cambridge, we would need a lot of capital. And being involved in a number of start-up spin-out businesses in the UK, most people spend a lot of time agonising about how little control can they give away in return for how much money can they raise. We actually decided to take a completely different tack at that point, which was we very deliberately wanted to build as big a business as possible to make the pie as big as possible and raise as much money as possible without quibbling as much as I've seen other companies entrepreneurs do about how much equity should be kept for the founders.
Peter Cowley: So, did you sell more than half the equity then in that round?
Martin Frost: We did.
Peter Cowley: Yes, that's very unusual.
Martin Frost: It is. So we gave away majority control, but actually it was majority equity control. And to be fair to Escala, and in particular to a chap called Per Matthew, who's still on our board, they absolutely trusted us with that money. So although they had majority of equity and economic rights in the company, we ran the company. In fact, I was the only signatory on the bank account of the company for two years. We had the minimum number of board meetings, which is one.
Peter Cowley: One a year!
Martin Frost: One a year. We had one board meeting a year for the first two years-
Peter Cowley: Plus, some very efficient management meetings one hopes.
Martin Frost: In local coffee shops. That's true. But again, I think we put a lot of trust in them by giving them majority economic control of the business and they put a huge amount of trust back in us and the way that the company should run. And we essentially just needed to move very, very fast and be left to get on with it.
Peter Cowley: So, you started with two or three employees when you got the money or three or four?
Martin Frost: Yes, that's right. I think we were three or four employees within two months.
Peter Cowley: And then when you'd raise the next round, how many employees have you got up to at that point?
Martin Frost: So, we raised our series A financing in, from memory, the late summer of 2015.
Peter Cowley: At 18 months or so.
Martin Frost: Yes. When we were approximately 40 people. By that time we'd already moved to this lovely site that we're looking at. And location has always been actually very important to us. We sort of jokingly called the agricultural shed, the equivalent of the Hewlett Packard garage in Palo Alto.
Peter Cowley: I should explain, we're about three miles from the centre of Cambridge here and about probably about a mile from the edge of Cambridge.
Martin Frost: It's been a fantastic location. Still today, more than half the company cycles to work. I've cycled up the hill from Cambridge to here, more times than I would like to.
Peter Cowley: Good for you.
Martin Frost: Yes. When we leave, I think I'm going to install the defibrillator halfway up the hill. I've sort of felt a need of bit on many occasions.
Peter Cowley: Your donation to society. By the time you get to the second round, the B round I suppose we could call it. Had you got something there, something that people could see working?
Martin Frost: Yes. Absolutely. But at that stage it was one arm. So in order to build what is a next generation surgical robot, there are a number of really important elements of it that we've needed
Martin Frost: Demonstrate to investors along the way as proof points of our ability to finish the journey. And that was essentially a completely new ground up designed for Robotica on incorporating all of the electronics within each of the robot arms with the same amount of dexterity and flexibility as your or my human arm. So very important to us is to fit easily and naturally into work flow around the theatre. And that means modelling that technology on the arm of a human surgeon.
Martin Frost: You'll see if you look at any one of our arms, it has what looks like a shoulder, a wrist, and an elbow. And those things aren't gimmicks. You know, they are there in order to give the surgeon, the surgical team, the same access that they get today if they were performing surgery manually.
Peter Cowley: And of course, there is a gorilla in this market.
Martin Frost: There is.
Peter Cowley: Davinci, don't know how robots they've sold, but it must be-
Martin Frost: Over 4,000.
Peter Cowley: So, you're competing against, they have a dominant position.
Martin Frost: They have a monopoly position until last year or so, that business called intuitive surgical, phenomenally performing business worth $55 billion. And Yes, not only is its’ technology good, but it's performed very, very well and has been the darling of the stock market in the states. And you know, I think what we're doing is absolutely phenomenal, but we do need to remind ourselves that during the time we've been alive, it's added about $30 billion to its market cap.
Peter Cowley: But you've learned to coarse clearly with much more agile than they have, and you've learned huge amounts from what they've done and what they can't do, I presume.
Martin Frost: I would not say that actually, Peter, I would say what we have done, we've done because we have listened very carefully to the marketplace, which in our case I,s, surgeons and healthcare administrators, not just in this country, that made it in Europe and the USA. And it was really clear to them that actually they didn't feel that their needs had yet fully being met by robotics, not, withstanding the good job that Davinci does.
You know, we believe absolutely there's a requirement for a robot to be used as often as a busy operating room for it to be portable, transportable, able to do many different types of surgery and able to be bought affordably by healthcare systems in this country, in the UK, but also across Europe.
Peter Cowley: And it should be pointed out, this is not an autonomous robot. This is a method for the surgeon to actually operate some arms.
Martin Frost: Correct. This is a human surgeon remaining in control of the procedure. From the moment the procedure starts, the moment it finishes, surgeon effectively instructs the instruments on the end of those arms how to move by moving surgical handgrips.
Peter Cowley: And how many instruments could there be?
Martin Frost: So typically, there's one instrument which holds the camera and up to another four arms. But we expect most procedures, we'll have what we call two instrument arms and one under scope arm.
Peter Cowley: Right. Okay. So before we go onto all the things you've learned over this time, can we just go forward through the funding? You've got about three years ago now. How much was that?
Martin Frost: So, we did a seed round of approximately $5 million dollars. If you don't mind me talking in dollars, Peter.
Peter Cowley: I don't mind. I do mind seed rounds being called $5 million dollars.
Martin Frost: But it's a good point because unless we could build the prototype, we couldn't demonstrate anything. So in our case, the seed round had to be that size.
Peter Cowley: Right. Fine.
Martin Frost: We then raised a series A in late 2015 and 2016 which in total was approximately $30 million dollars.
Peter Cowley: Which you brought in from other VC data.
Martin Frost: We did. So we brought in Cambridge innovation capital and we're delighted to have a British investor in the company alongside ABB.
Peter Cowley: ABB being a corporate gross?
Martin Frost: Well an industrial automation company, one of the world's largest. LGT, which is a very large institutional fund-
Peter Cowley: Based in...
Martin Frost: Based in Lichtenstein.
Peter Cowley: Okay.
Martin Frost: And combination of those investors alongside a scholar gave us a substantial base on which then to build the company.
Peter Cowley: And then you've just had one more, round since then?
Martin Frost: We've had one more, round since then, which is our series B where we raised just over a hundred million dollars. That is the largest private raise of any medical device company in Europe. And I think real demonstration of the ambition for a British company to enter this market. It's one of the fastest growing markets and medical devices are real statements of confidence in what we're doing in the management team and the very talented people we have here.
Peter Cowley: And from whom did that come?
Martin Frost: So, in addition to bringing in a new Chinese investor and another family office in the form of Votrient, all, of the existing investors substantially followed that money.
Peter Cowley: Good.
Martin Frost: And that for me was absolutely, critical. That statement again of yes, we want to bring in, you know, what may be two new shareholders, but it's not that we don't believe in this business. We do believe in this business and we're going to back it significantly. So more than 80% of the series B monies were raised from the existing investors.
Peter Cowley: Good. They've all got deep pockets and really believe in the business.
Martin Frost: Yes. I mean they've not just got deep pockets, they don't have a timescale.
Peter Cowley: Yes. They're all patient capital.
Martin Frost: They're essentially all patient capital. And that's given us, again, the freedom to build a business very much in the way that it would be being built if it was in silicon valley. You know, we're 250 people big now. We today occupy three leases, about to move into a 55,000 square foot building just on the north of Cambridge. That's a significant commitment from any company, any group of shareholders.
Peter Cowley: And how far have you got in terms of development, both technology and market?
Martin Frost: Well you had a go earlier, Peter, as far as the technology's concerned, it's what we would've wanted it to be. If you'd have come four years ago, I would have introduced you to a wooden arm. We've moved on a lot since then. And went out of the stage where this year soft products will be going into the marketing in a few months, time after we get our CE mark.
Peter Cowley: And for human operations?
Martin Frost: Yes.
Peter Cowley: Excellent.
Martin Frost: So that of course is the first, if you like, the first critical milestone of any medical devices company. And we're getting there within no more than a matter of months now. We always built the business to be global though, so of course we have interest from UK hospitals, but we also have from European countries and from the states.
Peter Cowley: So much and just for the listeners, why is your device, and the Davinci of course, better than the human being?
Martin Frost: Good question. Today if you and I have to have surgery and we found out we're just needing, you know, a traumatic intervention, the question is who do you want to be doing that surgery? And how do you want it done? There was a big debate raging in clinical circles probably 30 years ago around the benefits of something called keyhole or minimal access surgery over and above open surgery. And that debate today has been won, which is the benefits of minimal access surgery are faster recovery times, fewer complications, less use of opioids, fewer bed days.
Martin Frost: So, it's one of those medical innovations which is very good for the surgeon, very good for the patient, very good for the hospital. It's essentially a cheaper procedure which gets the patient to recovery faster and back home, everything we all want. What I think a lot of people don't understand is that what we call sort of minimal access, if you like, Laparoscopic surgery is phenomenally difficult to do.
Martin Frost: This is almost like asking you if you can untie and tie your shoelaces with two knitting needles with small graspers and scissors on the end of them. It's very difficult to do. It takes the best surgeons two years to completely master. And you know you've mastered it if you can suture, and the sadness is that not all surgeons who go through that training course can suture, which is a really, important skill.
What robotics does is it significantly shortens the learning curve and training for that surgeon, and it gets the vast, majority of surgeons to competence much faster. It also to a great extent, standardises the way in which surgery is done because still today you can get a lot more information on how well your school that you send your child is performing compared to the performance of a particular surgeons.
How many of us would ask a surgeon how many of a procedure, had they done before operating on us or our mother? So you just want them to be using the best possible tool to do the job. What a surgical robot does is it gives them better visualisation, it gives them better control of instruments, it gives them better wristed articulated instruments, and it enables them to perform the procedure in a far more ergonomically friendly way.
So rather than a surgeon standing above prone, doing four or five hours, worth of operation in order to perform a simple procedure, today surgeon can do all of that sitting in front of a 3D screen, sitting down, standing up however they like, take a break. And that's what we built here.
Peter Cowley: And presumably pricing comes in there somewhere because it's an expensive device-
Martin Frost: Pricing's absolutely, critical because in the end a hospital needs to compare the cost of a robotic procedure with the cost of that same procedure being done manually. And we want to add this few dollars, if you'd like, to that procedure as possible.
Peter Cowley: So, let's talk about growing pains and the future of this business. So it can't all be easy, right? There's kind of-
Martin Frost: No, it's not been for the fainthearted at all. Yes. We've been challenged on many fronts. I mean today we are in, Peter, this is one of seven buildings that we lease in Cambridge and you and I know how tight commercial property is in Cambridge. We've never ever taken a lease to its full term. So landlords must see us coming I think.
Peter Cowley: Denied compensation for your movie, yes, I've been through that.
Martin Frost: Finding the right people, recruiting them, and then integrating them into this business that has a very particular culture, that is hard.
Peter Cowley: So, you've been taking on probably two or three new people a week?
Martin Frost: I think for the last year, that will be true. Half the company wasn't here last year. That means we have fantastic people who work in recruitment. You know, we're interviewing many people every day, but you have to find the right environment to introduce those people into and you have to induct them well. And all of that of course, takes time away from your development timelines.
So, of course it's difficult. You know, recruiting technically very, very able people is a different matter from recruiting very good people managers. So as in any business, that's sort of four and a half years old, you get to this stage where actually this is a different business from the one we built four and a half years ago. We're asking ourselves now the questions of do we have the right structure? Do we have the right processes?
Martin Frost: We're now a medical device manufacturing business. The word processes part of everyday language and-
Peter Cowley: Will you continue to manufacturer do you think? Or will you outsource?
Martin Frost: So, we do final test assembly integration here in Cambridge. We work with a number of global contract manufacturers on the electromechanical assembly units and then on the instruments. And I think that's a model that we'll continue for a while.
Peter Cowley: Okay. Strange. So, have you? ... each question this will be, you look too old to have young kids, so have you had any sleepless nights in the last four and a half years; and if you have, why?
Martin Frost: So, I have one daughter. She's married now, so now I've paid for her wedding, no more sleepless nights. I think the challenge of running any business like this is that you can work every single minute of every single day. The principle challenges for me and for the team all come from the demands of speed, balanced by the need to build a device which is going to be safe. At the end of the day, we have to assume that this is going to be used on our children, on our parents, and we take that very, very seriously. But speed to market, in any start-up, is one of the keys, and previously I've been involved in lots of businesses that were too early. We find ourselves entering this market at probably its most interesting time.
Peter Cowley: So, the market pull is strong?
Martin Frost: The market pull is very strong.
Peter Cowley: Good.
Martin Frost: So Yes, the sleepless nights have come from how to find the next set of investors? Questions of where should we allocate our resources? At, the moment, I'm spending a lot of time outside of this country, banging the drum for robotics and for CMR in the States and in China. So how do you allocate your time between building the business on the ground here, and evangelising, essentially, around the world.
Peter Cowley: So, before we go onto a few tips for entrepreneurs, can you just get your crystal ball out and look forward three, four or five years for this business, and tell me what you can see?
Martin Frost: I think we'll be a substantial employer in the Cambridge area. We already employ 250 people here. I would expect us to double in size. So happy landlords in Cambridge start-
Peter Cowley: Happy employees as well of course.
Martin Frost: That growth, of course, will come mostly now in non-engineering functions. That's the other challenge of building a business like this, which is that it's actually relatively easy, on the global scale, to recruit world-class engineers from Cambridge. We need to employ world-class people across commercial, clinical, training, marketing functions, and we're needing to go further afield to recruit those people. So we already have a subsidiary in America, in India, in Italy. We've always thought global from day one, and to grow a business that we absolutely expect will be worth billions, you have to do that.
Peter Cowley: And so, in terms of market adoption, have you got a... You'd like to have 2% of the market in five years, or 20%?
Martin Frost: So, we believe that the market for robots in the end is in the tens of thousands. Today there are approximately 4,000 robots installed in the world. We believe that we can become one of the no more than three, four companies selling devices in that space. And I absolutely expect us to be selling hundreds of systems per year. That, in the end, critically means thousands of procedures, and it means thousands of patients' lives.
Peter Cowley: Brilliant. Okay. You are very ambitious and you've got something that's really on the route to something very successful. Have you got any tips for entrepreneurs on this route, on your many routes actually, over the years?
Martin Frost: Yes, I have. I think first of all, I'm now 55. In fact the company was incorporated on my birthday in 2014, so I know exactly how old I was when this business was started. So the first notable point is I wasn't 25; and I think that means to be able to bring a lot of learning, to the point where you can bring that learning to your co-founders, to investors, is really important.
I think for me, we are doing this because the market needs it. We didn't do this because we came up with a clever piece of technology and then built a product out of it, and then sought to find customers. It was very much the other way around with us. There was a clear unmet need and we have built a product to fill that need. So provided we built a product to the spec, that we had an awful lot of validation early on in the business, we were very confident that we would be able to sell that product.
Peter Cowley: And make a margin of course, because you can't-
Martin Frost: Well, that's critical.
Peter Cowley: ... because you can't possibly sell on price.
Martin Frost: In devices, you need to be able to make a gross margin of 65%.
Peter Cowley: Is that the number? Okay.
Martin Frost: Yes, that is the golden number in medical devices.
Peter Cowley: Yes. Okay.
Martin Frost: So, going back to lessons, I think as entrepreneurs, where is our limitation? Our limitation always is time actually. Everybody thinks of your limitation is on money, or it's people. Actually time is the scarce resource here, and if you are going to spend time working on solving a problem, find the biggest possible problem you can to solve. For us, that means millions of patients around the world. But if we put a solution into the world market to address that problem, we will build a big business. We'll have spent the same amount of time on doing this that somebody else decided to build a business that will be ultimately worth, you know, a few millions of pounds. For us, if we build a business worth a few millions of pounds, we will have failed.
Peter Cowley: And have you got time pressure from competitors as well?
Martin Frost: Yes, we do. The biggest devices companies in the world are seeking to get into this market. So that's an imperative on us, as well as the investment imperative. But with an overriding brake on this, if you like, that whatever you have to do, you have to do it safely and as well as possible.
Martin Frost: So firstly, find the biggest problem that you can, and then go very fast. I think it's more important to worry about how big the cake is than how big your slice of that cake is. We know that, as entrepreneurs, that if we make the cake as big as possible, then many people will win.
Peter Cowley: And you have a great social outcome here as well. It's not just money.
Martin Frost: It isn't, trust us. Of course I'm absolutely of the opinion that you have to raise as much money as possible when you can raise it, and we've managed to do that time and time again.
Next thing I would say is find people who are not like you.
Peter Cowley: Okay.
Martin Frost: So, I'm one of a number, of founders in this business. We all hold to the same sort of humble ambition, if you like, of getting this kit ultimately out into the market. But we're not alike. We bring different skillsets, and emotionally we are different. And I absolutely subscribe to that, whether it be at the executive level, at the board level. We're in the process of adding non-executive directors to our board at the moment. We are absolutely looking for people who have got different experiences and who are not like us.
Peter Cowley: The old challenge here, Yes, of course.
Martin Frost: That is absolutely, critical. And then I think in a global business you have to realise that you yourself are part of the brand of the company that you're building. For somebody who started off as a monkey and an accountant, self-effacing, that's a challenge, because if this business were in Silicon Valley, we wouldn't have been shouting loud enough three to four years ago.
Now the challenge is for us to build this business on a global scale, representing the values that are absolutely ours and that we ascribe to here. But nonetheless, that challenge is out. It's not in this building, it's not in this country. So now the challenge for us becomes how do you simultaneously tell that story on the global stage, whilst making sure that the business is built properly and managed internally? That's just the next challenge.
I think also, be prepared to help people. From time to time I've had breakfast with other local entrepreneurs, local business leaders in Cambridge. The rules for breakfast are you talk about everything, but it stays at the breakfast table. I think that's really valuable, because they're not in the business and therefore they're not going to undermine you in that business; but finding other people who are going on a similar journey, who you can learn from, has been very, very important to me. Even if it's just simply to enable you to vent about what's frustrating you, I think it's really, really important.
Finally, I would say, at the age I am now, to build a global business and to do it from Cambridge, you need to be fit enough to do it.
Peter Cowley: In terms of air miles or...?
Martin Frost: You need to be physically fit enough to do it. I travel a lot these days. I absolutely love this business, and I love what I do, but I think physical health and mental health are absolutely critical to me being able to do this job.
There is one final tip, which is, for entrepreneurs, co-founders, I think you really need to ask yourself what sort of a business you want to build, and to be honest about it. Because most people say they want to start a business, but actually they don't define that in terms of longevity. Are you actually trying to build the business to licence technology and to sell the business?
In the early days, we were looking to build a prototype, get it into market, and sell the business. We've taken the very bold decision that we are building a medical devices manufacturing business here, and that has no timescale. But that then leads to all sorts of other consequences about tying people in, about expected capital returns for investors and founders. So I think it's really, really critical that founders ask themselves, and are honest with themselves, about what sort of a business, what business model are they pursuing.
Peter Cowley: Excellent, Martin. That has been very, very interesting. I've learnt a huge amount from you. Thank you very much.
Martin Frost: Thanks Peter.
Peter Cowley: Thanks for listening to another Invested Investor podcast. You can subscribe to all future podcasts via our website; investedinvestor.com, or via a number of podcast platforms online. Remember, you can order our book online, and be sure to follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook to get the most up to date, interesting, and insightful content from the Invested Investor.
