John Murphy left a corporate COO role to become employee number one at Virtual Incision then spent the next 14 years building MIRA, the world’s first miniaturised soft tissue surgical robot.

The pitch? A little robot on the inside, instead of a big one reaching in from the outside. The journey included five alpha iterations, a 30,000-page FDA de novo submission, remote surgery experiments from the International Space Station, and raising every dollar from Midwest investors after getting zero interest from Boston or Silicon Valley.

Now advising the next generation of medtech founders, John shares the tactical, financial, and personal lessons from one of surgical robotics’ longest development cycles.