Today's Entrepreneur: Eric Dy

Belgian American Education Foundation Fellowship, Extreme Tech Challenge Finalist, MedTech Innovator Award

The most frustrating is having more ideas than resources to tackle. The opportunities can be right in front of your eye but other priorities and insufficient time, money, and people prevent us from capturing them.

The most rewarding part is finding success after many long months and years of grinding away. Sharing this with my team who have each made so many sacrifices to get us to where we are helps us continue to power through all obstacles.

Underestimating the time something is going to take and trying to take on too much. This includes both building product, but also business development, and external commitments that can be distracting.

1) Nothing is ever as easy as it looks. 
2) No matter how smart your idea may be, if you cannot effectively communicate it within a compelling narrative it will not get funded or attention. 
3) Keep an eye on the competition but focus on your product. Execution is everything.

I've intimately exposed to the inner workings of healthcare my entire life since my father was a surgeon and mother an ER nurse.  Seeing how they were respected and relied on to help others with whatever medical condition they had was the seed for my desire to work on medical and healthcare related problems.  

Following my PhD in Biomedical Engineering at UCLA I was invited to do a postdoc at the Belgian based nanoelectronics R&D institute IMEC, where I later escaped the lab to take a role in business development.  I loved working with partners to understand their problems and translating the work of our brilliant scientist and engineers into solutions that could accelerate our partner's roadmaps. 

While working at IMEC I met my co-founder Julien Penders who was leading a team developing advanced wearables for consumer and medical markets.  We immediately hit it off and shared a similar vision for the future of healthcare and medical discovery and innovation that leveraged consumer generated datasets. Frighteningly, that was almost 4 years ago.  

Starting Bloom has been the most challenging and most rewarding experience of my life.  I'm working with some of my closest friends who are all ridiculously talented, building solutions that can impact millions of families, and solving the biggest challenges facing maternal health today.