Sid also convinced Milt McColl, a very experienced medical device entrepreneur whom he had met, to sign on as first CEO of the company. This allowed Sid to build his vision for the technology, and he named the product Triton. “Mentorship is super helpful because you don’t need to continually discover everything on your own. Going to them with questions allowed me to think with a level of sophistication about the business that I didn’t have. I was leveraging their experience.” Sid tirelessly took part in pitching, talking to angel investors in bio design, questioning advisors, and hiring staff. To do this, he drew on his previous experience in a business plan competition. In his senior year at university, Sid applied his work on computational fluid dynamics to optimize the amount of whitening fluid for each tooth by creating personalized tooth whitening trays. Although Sid won this business plan competition, he realized he wasn’t passionate enough about the idea. But it was invaluable in preparing him for this next step of founding Gauss Surgical. From a little business incubator space in a building in Palo Alto, Sid worked hard to raise funding. He admits to having no money, and often “pulling all-nighters at the office.” He also found out how hard it is to get medical tech approval from the Food and Drug Administration in the USA. However, he kept pushing, and in a short space of time Sid had raised millions and was winning awards. In 2018, he won the Apple Design Award. “We initially used the iPad as a user interface and ran the algorithms on a server. Now the product runs on an iPad Pro with an infrared sensor and processes all images on the iPad itself.” In the same year he was named as one of the “30 under 30” in Healthcare by Forbes. In 2021, Sid sold Gauss Surgical to Stryker, a leading med tech company. “It was a privilege to build Gauss Surgical with a dream team, investors, and customers, but I knew a company like Stryker could take this product to a new level.” Sid is now VP of Innovation at Stryker. Sid has some tips for young people wanting to start a tech business. (Continued on page 12) Above and right: Triton in action in the operating room. Courtesy of Gauss
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