I've spent 35 years getting hard technology out of the lab and into the world: the first consumer Wi-Fi hotspot at Bell Labs, a $500M product line at Ascend Communications, and the FDA De Novo clearance at Galen Robotics. Today I run Base Reality Group as a fractional CPO for hard-tech founders.
I've made every mistake I warn founders about. Some of them more than once. I wrote Founders Who Finish for the founders living those mistakes now. Your audience won't get theory. They'll get what happened, what went wrong, what worked, and what to do differently in their own companies.
What you can expect
Podcast hosts tell me the conversation has energy. That I bring passion without performance. That I follow their lead and let the interview go where it needs to go.
Twenty-plus years in Toastmasters International means I can hit a point fast when you need it, or take your audience deeper when the moment calls for it. The pacing works either way.
I'm direct, but I'm not a jerk about it. I've worked with brilliant people and absolute nightmares. I've raised money from billionaires and I've bootstrapped. I've shipped products that made it into operating rooms, and I've shipped products that died before launch. That range means I can meet founders where they are.
A field manual for entrepreneurs who are done with the startup unicorn B.S. It's written for bootstrap-first founders, stalled founders grinding without progress, and corporate refugees who left the 9-to-5 only to build a worse version of it for themselves.
The book cuts through startup mythology and focuses on what actually matters: finishing what you start, knowing your numbers, and building systems that work without you. I also publish The Build, a monthly printed newsletter for founders building in regulated markets.
Why founders can build the thing but can't explain the thing, and how a weak product narrative quietly caps fundraising, hiring, and sales all at once. What I learned positioning a surgical robot nobody had a category for.
How I learned to validate products in an industry where mistakes literally kill people, and how those same principles work for any B2B product trying to figure out if people will actually pay.
What product leadership actually does at the seed-to-Series-A stage, what founders get wrong when they try to cover it themselves, and how to tell if the gap is strategy, narrative, or execution.
Revenue, costs, runway. Why 47 KPIs on a dashboard is a symptom, not a strategy, and the story of a company that died with beautiful metrics and an empty bank account.
The unglamorous work behind taking a Johns Hopkins lab prototype to FDA De Novo clearance, and what founders in any hard-tech space can steal from it.
I've shut down profitable companies and pushed through situations that looked hopeless, including walking away from a billionaire investor who was destroying the company. The framework behind that decision.
How to tell if you're making progress or just looking busy. Includes the mahogany desk test, and why I've seen companies spend more on office furniture than customer acquisition.
The real cost of taking someone else's money and how to build without it. This isn't anti-VC dogma. It's math and psychology about what happens when your cap table has the wrong people on it.
How founders become the constraint in their own companies and what to do about it. Includes the four-box delegation matrix and why "no one can do it as well as I can" is slowly killing your business.
Right-click to save the headshot, or email me for a high-resolution version. Both bios below are yours to use as written.
Dave Saunders co-founded Galen Robotics, leading the company to a $25.5M Series A and FDA De Novo clearance for the world's first cooperatively controlled microsurgical robotic assistant. His 35-year career spans early internet infrastructure, Bell Labs, and surgical robotics. He's the author of Founders Who Finish and runs Base Reality Group, a fractional CPO practice for hard-tech founders.
Dave Saunders co-founded Galen Robotics, where he led the team from Johns Hopkins prototype to a $25.5M Series A and FDA De Novo clearance for the world's first cooperatively controlled microsurgical robotic assistant. He managed a 35-patent portfolio licensed from Johns Hopkins, commercializing technology developed in Dr. Russell Taylor's laboratory.
Dave's career spans 35 years. He helped build early internet infrastructure at Ascend Communications, worked on the first consumer Wi-Fi hotspot at Bell Labs, and pivoted to surgical robotics in 2011.
Today Dave runs Base Reality Group, a fractional CPO practice for hard-tech founders, with his deepest credential in surgical robotics and advanced interventional medical devices. He's the author of Founders Who Finish and publishes The Build, a monthly printed newsletter for founders building in regulated markets. He lives in Baltimore.
I respond to all serious podcast inquiries within 24 hours. Tell me a little about your show and audience, and I'll come back with angles that fit.