Mike Hooven's career defies the corporate cliches
By Carolyn Pione
The early years of Ethicon Endo-Surgery were exciting times for Mike Hooven and others who helped launch the company in Cincinnati 20 years ago.
The energy among its engineers was contagious, the money was flowing from parent company Johnson & Johnson and the startup-like culture spurred innovative ideas and products long before "innovation" was the catchphrase of corporate America.
The endoscopic revolution was exploding as doctors and patients fueled demand for small, delicate instruments that could be used to diagnose problems by going easily inside the human body - today they are called minimally invasive medical devices.
"J&J basically gave us a blank check -- $500 million to do research and development and beat U.S. Surgical," says Hooven, 54, who left a high-level job at Siemens/Pacesetter in Los Angeles to move to Cincinnati and lead product development at Ethicon.
It was 1989 and Hooven and his team hired 200 engineers in 18 months as the company ramped up to begin going head-to-head with U.S. Surgical in the exploding endoscopic instrument business.
J&J had come into Southwest Ohio in 1986 by buying SenMed, and the new division flourished far from the New Jersey headquarters, initially at Park 50 in Milford and later on its own campus in Blue Ash. The company's idea was to allow for the growth of an environment where ideas became hot-selling medical devices - a big company with a small company's focus and spirit.
Hooven, whose career by that time had included a major product development role at Cordis Corp. as well as Siemens, says the culture was unprecedented and exhilarating.
The company was run then by Ray Ogle and Rick D'Augustine, who is now an executive-in-residence at CincyTech. Ogle handled operations and D'Augustine handled administration and business development. The pair understood how to breed the much-sought-after "innovative" corporate culture, says Hooven.
"There are always going to be problems and delays with medical device research and production," said Hooven. "But we all understood our biggest job was to get the product onto the market."
Hooven has spent his life getting products onto the market. A graduate of the University of Michigan with a bachelor's in physics and a master's in mechanical engineering, he wasn't necessarily destined for a career in medical device making, yet today he holds 58 U.S. patents and 132 issued and pending U.S. and international patents.
He also founded Atricure Inc. in West Chester, which went public in 2005 and in by 2008 had more than $55 million in annual revenue and more than 200 employees. The story of its beginnings - Hooven wiring his wife's nail clippers to a generator to cut and close wounds in one step -- is widely told in entrepreneurial and life sciences circles around Ohio and elsewhere.
But Hooven's time at Ethicon, contributing to a creative and prolific environment, also holds lessons for local would-be entrepreneurs.
He started his career at Cordis in Miami, (now part of J&J) working on neurosurgical devices. His education, which focused on fluid mechanics, helped him get that job, and he thrived there, working closely with its legendary CEO, Norm Weldon, who became a mentor and later a partner in Atricure.
"I flew to Miami for the interview and heard Weldon speak. At that point I decided I wanted to work for him. He was the type of person I felt I could learn a lot from. I also thought he would appreciate what I could do there."
Hooven spent five years in the neurosurgical division of Cordis, (later sold to Integra Life Sciences) , forming friendships for life with his intensely dedicated co-workers, including his future wife, Sue. When the division was moved to the French Riviera, though, Hooven took a job with Siemens, and the Hoovens moved to L.A.
Two years later, when he moved from Siemens to Ethicon, Hooven already knew he'd start his own company one day. But in the meantime, Ethicon taught him "an incredible amount about what it takes to get a product to market.
"Corporate in New Jersey let us do what we needed to do," says Hooven. "We made a lot of mistakes, but the attitude was not 'let's find out who's to blame'. It was focused on 'let's fix the problem.'
"Of course you've got to meet your goals and objectives to be successful. But if everything goes as planned, you don't learn anything. I saw a lot of mistakes, many of them my own, and I learned a tremendous amount.
"The other thing that was huge was that I made an incredible number of valuable contacts."
Hooven spent six years at Ethicon, making contacts there while keeping close ties to old friends such as Weldon. When he finally decided to leap into his own venture in April 1994, it was Weldon who advised him to make a clean break -- to get out of Ethicon first, sell his J&J options and to wait until he was clear of those ties before creating intellectual property on which to build his own business. It was the ethical route, albeit financially painful.
"The hardest thing I did was sell those options," said Hooven. "I got $22,000." That $22,000 along with $1,000 each from Weldon, D'Augustine and Weldon's partner Karen Cassidy, comprised the $25,000 starting capital for Hooven's first business, Enable Medical Corp.
Hooven later raised an additional $425,000 for Enable with a hand-selected group of original investors, and grew the business to over more than 60 people in the ensuing years. He spun out AtriCure in November 2000 and spent five years growing Atricure before the IPO, which returned to his original Enable investors $46 for every dollar they had invested with him - a tremendous return even by venture capital standards.
Today Hooven remains a director of AtriCcure, and he's continued to invent and collaborate on minimally invasive devices through his company, Enable Medical Technologies. (The original Enable was acquired by AtriCure.) Hooven expects he'll keep inventing for the rest of his life.
"One of the greatest things I gained at J&J and Ethicon was seeing all the things that could go wrong in getting things to market," says Hooven. "If you don't have that experience (as an entrepreneur) you need to have access to someone who does."
On what he learned at Ethicon about innovation, Hooven says it's important to be given the license to make mistakes, although he wouldn't go so far as to say that failure should be acceptable.
"It's OK to make mistakes," he says. "You just have to get the product out."
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Mike Hooven's grandfather, Frederick J. Hooven, was a Dayton-area engineer and inventor with 38 major US patents who worked with the Wright brothers as a very young man. Here's an excerpt from a TIGHER wiki entry about him: "Frederick Hooven installed one of the protoype units in Amelia Earhart's Electra 10E in 1936. However Earhart swapped this unit out with a lighter, earlier system. Her failure to find the island with the equipment on board the aircraft is likely the main reason for her disappearance and this has been cited as a flaw in planning." (http://www.tighar.org/wiki/Frederick_J._Hooven ) Here's a link to the biography of Frederick J. Hooven: http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=1384&page=201
And here's a link to Mike Hooven's LinkedIn public profile: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/mike-hooven/14/ab6/507