Article preview reprinted from IN VIVO - June, 2009
In Vivo interviews device entrepreneur Fred Khosravi about his secrets for success in medical device company creation. Khosravi was part of the ACS organization that eventually became Guidant, where he was on the leading edge of the coronary stent revolution. That experience provided Khosravi with a broad background in interventional cardiology devices that was useful in starting his first company, carotid stent company EndoTex Interventional Systems (which was acquired by Boston Scientific) and several other successful companies. Read more...
Interview with Fred Khosravi
Q: Before we get into your career, let's start with where you were born. You're Kurdish and you were born in Iran. What led you to come to the US?
Fred Khosravi: I'm Kurdish from Iran. Both my mother and father are Kurdish. My dad was in the Kurdish Liberation Movement. He fought pretty much most of his life to maintain and uphold the Kurdish identity, which is an identity that, if you don't really try to hold on to it, is going to go away. So he fought long and hard, spent years in the Shah's jails, and then came out and got back on his feet. He was actually a real testament to entrepreneurship.
Q: He was also a member of a cabinet in which most of the other ministers were executed.
Yes. But his sentence was commuted.
Q: I know that when you came to the United States, you started off in Tennessee of all places. Why Tennessee? Is there a natural Kurdish-Tennessee relationship?
(laughs) Yes, a Kurdish affiliation with Cookeville, Tennessee. In fact, I'm wearing my Tennessee Tech cufflinks to Stanford. I came to the US because I was effectively running away from the revolution. Actually, I wasn't running away from the revolution; I wanted to be part of the revolution. But my dad didn't think that was a great idea, so he put me on a plane and sent me to the US. I was 16 years old and started in Cookeville because a friend of mine, who had come to the US about a year before, had ended up in Cookeville. So that's where I went.
Q: When you graduated from college, you were looking at jobs in a number of different industries: medical devices, automotive, and defense. Why did you choose devices? And where was your first job?
There was a lot of luck involved. When I got out of school, I had offers from companies in the automotive industry, the defense industry, and the medical device industry, and to be honest, I didn't even know what the medical device industry was. But it sounded more interesting than the other two and I took the job in devices, not really knowing what I was getting myself into. There was a good deal of naiveté in my decision, which is a kind of theme in my career.
- David Cassak
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