Garrett Schumacher is Business Unit Director of Product Security at Velentium Medical and the co-founder and CTO of GeneInfoSec. Garrett discusses his journey from medical student to cybersecurity expert and educator, dedicating his career to securing medical devices. He shares insights on the intersection of cybersecurity and healthcare, highlighting the challenges of protecting genetic data. Garrett gives honest advice about navigating cybersecurity and data privacy concerns, how to be a good leader, and what...
Garrett Schumacher is Business Unit Director of Product Security at Velentium Medical and the co-founder and CTO of GeneInfoSec. Garrett discusses his journey from medical student to cybersecurity expert and educator, dedicating his career to securing medical devices. He shares insights on the intersection of cybersecurity and healthcare, highlighting the challenges of protecting genetic data. Garrett gives honest advice about navigating cybersecurity and data privacy concerns, how to be a good leader, and what medtech startups should consider as they design and develop their devices.
Guest links: https://velentiummedical.com/ | https://www.geneinfosec.com/
Charity supported: Save the Children
Interested in being a guest on the show or have feedback to share? Email us at theleadingdifference@velentium.com.
PRODUCTION CREDITS
Host & Editor: Lindsey Dinneen
Producer: Velentium Medical
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Episode 068 - Garrett Schumacher
[00:00:00] Lindsey Dinneen: Hi, I'm Lindsey and I'm talking with MedTech industry leaders on how they change lives for a better world.
[00:00:09] Diane Bouis: The inventions and technologies are fascinating and so are the people who work with them.
[00:00:15] Frank Jaskulke: There was a period of time where I realized, fundamentally, my job was to go hang out with really smart people that are saving lives and then do work that would help them save more lives.
[00:00:28] Diane Bouis: I got into the business to save lives and it is incredibly motivating to work with people who are in that same business, saving or improving lives.
[00:00:38] Duane Mancini: What better industry than where I get to wake up every day and just save people's lives.
[00:00:42] Lindsey Dinneen: These are extraordinary people doing extraordinary work, and this is The Leading Difference.
Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Leading Difference Podcast. I'm your host, Lindsey, and today I am excited to introduce you to my guest, Garrett Schumacher. Garrett is the Business Unit Director of Product Security at Velentium Medical, where he has led the cybersecurity efforts on 200 plus medical device products and systems.
He is the co-founder and CTO of GeneInfoSec, a startup focused on securing the world's most valuable and private data, our genetic information. In his work, Garrett has trained engineers, developers, manufacturers, healthcare delivery organizations, and laboratories across the globe in cybersecurity, and is an active member of several related industry working groups.
He also teaches secure product development and medical device cybersecurity at the graduate level for the University of Colorado Boulder's Department of Computer Science as an adjunct professor in the little bit of time left in his days, Garrett is either rock climbing or spending time with family.
Thank you so much for being here, Garrett. I'm so excited to speak with you today.
[00:01:48] Garrett Schumacher: Yeah. Thank you for having me.
[00:01:49] Lindsey Dinneen: Of course. Well, I'd love, if you wouldn't mind, by starting out and sharing a little bit about yourself and your background and what led you to medtech.
[00:01:59] Garrett Schumacher: Yeah. So I guess my background, I mean, it started as I always thought I was gonna be a doctor. I did my undergrad in physiology, thought I was gonna do med school, the whole nine yards. And towards the end of my, let's say junior year, just started being like, "I don't think this is what I want to do."
I always had a fascination with tech. I was really involved with a lot of the tech groups on campus at the University of Colorado Boulder, early days of Hack CU, one of the largest collegiate hackathons. And I really regretted not doing a computer science degree, but I was three quarters of the way done. So sometimes you just gotta finish it up, right? Get the degree, find out what's next.
After that I went and did a master's in genetics. I wasn't sure exactly what I wanted to do either yet, but hey, a master's degree is not a bad thing to do if you're unsure. And actually I was in a PhD program and dropped out early with a master's. Different story. But yeah. And then I started I helped the University of Colorado Boulder start their cybersecurity programs. So it was getting into the cyber world. I did a, I guess it was a bootcamp, at the University of Denver in cybersecurity. And so that all culminated in me always focusing on healthcare and cybersecurity together.
And then COVID happened and that made the world change for a lot of people. And basically I was looking for a new job and I found Velentium, and I think that's where it really spoke to me, where I could do my love of medical and human health with cybersecurity and technology development. And so yeah, I think that's really how I got into it. I had been doing projects related to that before, but Velentium's where it really culminated and I found a place that let me do all the things I love, not just one or the other.
[00:03:39] Lindsey Dinneen: That's awesome and such a wonderful gift. So can you share a little bit about what you do now and sort of your growth trajectory even throughout Velentium 'cause I know you've had quite an interesting and exciting career through the company as well.
[00:03:56] Garrett Schumacher: Yeah. Yeah. So I started out as a cybersecurity engineer, and just started helping internal projects, external projects with groups that were seeking FDA approval on a medical device and trying to navigate these kind of new cybersecurity requirements. That's where it started. And even since then I've been, so I teach a class at the University of Colorado Boulder on Medical Device Cybersecurity. We're going into our sixth year of that, seventh semester, starting here in the fall. And I also co-founded a startup in the genetic information security space.
So, and we can talk about that later. And so I, yeah, talk about what I do. It's all of those things and, it's not, doesn't happen in 40 hours, I promise you that. But after working as a cyber engineer for about a year, I think I got promoted to like Senior Staff Cybersecurity Engineer. Then probably three years ago, I took over more of an operational leadership role within the unit, the team, where I was doing project management and overseeing the other engineers and still doing engineering work. Definitely decided project management is not for the faint of heart and apparently my heart's very faint. It's not for me.
So anyways, and then fast forward to just here in like January, February, Velentium made some really awesome changes. They rebranded as Velentium Medical to make sure everyone knew we do medical. And then they created four business units so that they could really say, "Look, we have different core areas of our business. Each of them have their own different operational needs and what have you." So, I was promoted into Business Unit Director of Product Security.
And so now we're a business unit. We're a business within a business trying to better serve our clients and implement the processes we need for our small scope of work compared to a large contract development and manufacturing organization. So just that's been my growth goal so far is, come in as an engineer, work my way up to the leadership roles while also still loving to be an educator and and still having my own startup space in the biotech side of the house.
[00:05:58] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Excellent. Well, first of all, congratulations on all of that. That is very exciting and it's really fun to see that growth and that development. And I'm also so curious now, can we talk a little bit about your startup? So first of all, let's talk about that and then I wanna talk about the crossover between the two, if that's okay. So.
[00:06:16] Garrett Schumacher: Absolutely. Yeah. So, well the name is GeneInfoSec, so it's just short for genetic information security. We're not trying to hide anything there. We focus on protecting the world's most sensitive data. At least that's our opinion is genetic information affects you. And the data you have today is not gonna be any different, for the most part, from the data that you have in, 10, 20, 40 years.
But then even beyond that it's partially your children's data, your grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and then even on the, in the inverse, all the way up to your great-great-grandparents, right? You share some, to an extent, some genetic makeup with them. And so it's this really interesting space where networked privacy is-- it's a very different form of networked privacy. It's not just that I upload a photo to LinkedIn and now I could be implicating someone else that's in the photo. It's, I share my info, and I'm also sharing info that belongs to my cousins in, in, in a sense.
And so if you think of the Golden State Killer case in California, that was a really interesting one where the federal authorities had genetic information or samples from a cold case in the eighties. And they sequenced that. They uploaded it to a third party, an open public genetic database, and said, "Hey, here's my data. Who am I related to?" And through that they were able to triangulate like, "Okay here it is. This is the guy that did it" many years later. So, there's a case where it's, there could be positives. We want to use it to find that kind of information and protect people.
But at the same time, that brings up a lot of privacy implications. And then you can go all the way to the extreme, the sci-fi of designer bio weapons, maybe tailored to certain persons or ethnicities or groups of people. So during grad school, a couple guys and I, we founded this startup, and that's what we focus on through a technology that really our founder, Dr. Sterling Sawaya, he invented, called molecular encryption. It's a way of encrypting molecules before we generate data from them so that the generated genetic data is already, quote unquote encrypted, or at least protected in some manner. So, so that's what we do. And yeah, I guess why we do it a bit.
[00:08:27] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Wow. So, okay, so that brings up a really interesting question. I can guess the answer to this, but is there any safe way to-- this is a funny way to put it-- but recreationally to test your genetic data in the sense of the way that a lot of us would think about it in terms of, "Oh, I'd really love to learn more about my ancestors and things like that." But there are so many security concerns, like you've pointed out. So is there any quote unquote, safe way to do so at this time?
[00:08:58] Garrett Schumacher: You know that-- it's a great question. There's been a lot of things going on in the news recently, like with, I'm sure people have heard of 23 & Me, and how they went bankrupt and now a company called Regeneron is buying them and all their assets for a lot of money, but not that much compared to what 23 & Me was worth a few years ago. So that brings up a lot of issues, right? 23 & Me still owns a lot of samples, like maybe around 10 million samples. And the sequencing they've been doing is very small.
So if your genome's a whole book, they've been kind of flipping through the pages and picking specific letters, and that's the data they have. So that's not the most sensitive, it's not the full story. But if you have the samples, you can always generate the full book someday. And as that cost of full human genome sequencing decreases rapidly, someone's probably gonna want to do that someday.
So, okay, so back to your question though, is there a safe way? What I would say is that I, I don't tell people not to do it. I would say if you have health reasons, concerns, and your doctor suggests a genetic test, a lot of those tests are also that similar, picking a few letters, a few known letters and trying to just read that for a very specific purpose. If your doctor and you come to the agreement that you should do that, you should just do that.
However, I do not promote, and even to my family members, I highly don't recommend, using these services. I used to really love who's that group out of Utah? Ancestry.com. They used to be a great group. They were trying to sequence the world's DNA for understanding basically the family tree of everyone. Because anyways, they have interest in understanding who's related to who and how that relates to their religion. So they used to do it for internal purposes, keep it on pretty tight, secure. Well then, they sold to a venture capital group.
So, it's really tough to say that there's these groups that there's a good place out there to do it. There are some companies that have security or privacy focused DNA sequencing services. But it's really odd, like you have to set up a cryptocurrency account, pay with cryptocurrency, set up a PO box so that you're not like actually shipping to and from your home. And then ultimately the price of it and how they're getting it to be cost effective is China's doing the sequencing. So you do all those privacy measures and your sample gets sent off to another country. And the FBI has disclosed that they know that when certain countries like that are doing the sequencing, whether you want them to do a little tiny test, like a COVID test or whatever it is, they're sequencing the whole thing. They're keeping the data. This is known, disclosed, not conjecture.
So, yeah, so sorry-- long-winded answer of saying, I'm interested too, I wanna learn about this. I've got family members that have done it. But right now I recommend just thinking very carefully and critically about whether the immediate fun of it is worth the potential long-term impacts, and maybe if you're someone that's security or privacy conscious, maybe wait a few years because there are some things on the horizon that will make this a lot better.
[00:12:02] Lindsey Dinneen: All right! Thank you for the honest answer. I really appreciate it. So, okay, I wanna go back to your work with Velentium specifically and talk about-- you've gotten to work with so many different clients over the years and you've seen so many different variations on a theme. And I'm curious, what are some of the common mistakes or pitfalls you might see a younger startup make when they are perhaps first designing their device, and cybersecurity is maybe not quite top of mind. So what are some of the things that you see that are challenges we can overcome?
[00:12:41] Garrett Schumacher: Yeah I think one of the biggest challenges is that a lot of people aren't maybe aware yet of the scrutiny and the requirements that the FDA-- and not just FDA, but the European union's medical device regulations and the bodies over there that review submissions. And any, if you look across the board, pretty much almost every regulatory market has, very much in the last couple years, placed a lot of scrutiny on cybersecurity. So a lot of companies, especially smaller ones starting out in the space, may not be aware of this. And so then oftentimes they'll find out too late, they'll submit. They'll get feedback back, "Oh no, we have 90 days to respond and we didn't do cyber. We gotta do cyber now."
And they don't know how to spell it yet, which is a joke. But there's that. And then there's also, or they'll get in just late at the game, "Hey, we're submitting in a month or three" and "Oh, we gotta do this thing retroactively." And so then therefore, we haven't been able to support someone through the full process, at the proper time, doing the right design things to inform the design during the design, not after. So I think that's probably the biggest mistake is not seeking that external support early and often. And if you're getting that, it shouldn't just be someone that can help you navigate the regulatory space. It shouldn't be someone that can just do the pen testing for you at the end. Really I think in that context, you need a partner that can do everything end to end.
So that's what we've really tried to make our processes and our services geared towards is being that partner. And whether you have the bandwidth and you will do a lot of the documentation and work, but you just need someone to guide you, consult you, give you the materials to do so, or if you are truly looking for, no, we need to augment our own team and have you do a lot more of the work for us. That's great. We can do that. So, so that's, I think, the biggest challenge. And I think that the answer is just getting the right partner early and working with them often throughout that entire development, not at the end.
[00:14:37] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, absolutely. And I really appreciate that perspective. I think that there's a lot more awareness, it seems like even in the industry that, "Oh, cybersecurity is a thing now." But as you said, getting to partner with somebody who does know the ins and outs from the start and can really help guide you through is really critical. Now you do quite a bit of speaking and presenting. You're obviously still teaching a college class and all of those wonderful things. I'm curious how that has played into your career as well, and is that something that you will always want to do? You've got this educator side of you as well.
[00:15:13] Garrett Schumacher: Yeah, I mean, I love it. I actually taught at a high school for one year between my master's program and my undergraduate, decided that that's not for me, but that teaching at those higher levels where people are really wanting to be in the room. So now I teach at the graduate level, half of the students will be older than me. And now everybody wants to be there and we can have very mature conversations and they even can challenge me with some really great questions that I'm not ready for, right? And I think the best way to learn is to teach. Absolutely. That's, yeah. I think a lot of people have said that. I completely agree. So I plan to always do that.
I mean, I love, even with our internal engineers and external clients, like the idea of helping people understand something and humanizing it for 'em. That's really my big flag I'm waving right now is humanizing it. We don't have to use alphabet soups and crazy language. We can make it easy to understand and we can humanize it for the masses. So that's really what I'm trying to do, one of my big pushes. And so I don't foresee myself ever going away from that, I even do a lot of international training on the cyber biosecurity space where I go to all these countries and these biosafety laboratories and help biologists understand cybersecurity as a fundamental practice and how they can improve their personal security, their professional security. And to me that's the most rewarding thing.
[00:16:36] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Oh my goodness. That's so cool. Thank you for sharing about that. So, as you are looking towards the future in the industry itself, but also I suppose your own career, what are some things that you're excited about? What are some trends that you see as being positive? I know that, recently, it's been a little bit challenging-- as a nice word-- for a lot of medical device companies and they're a little worried about funding and those kinds of things, and so, that's maybe a trend that's a little not as fun, but what are the things that are empowering and exciting to you as we move forward?
[00:17:13] Garrett Schumacher: So not to make it about artificial intelligence or machine learning, 'cause everybody does. It's definitely, its hype curve. But that is actually one of the things that I think I'm most excited about, but also most scared about. We've seen a lot of companies with layoffs because they believe this artificial intelligence enables them to be more efficient and therefore they can do more with fewer people. And that saves money. And I understand that. I think that one of my big pushes right now is trying to help people understand that AI, at least right now, it's not taking over human jobs-- that it can instead augment, improve how we do those jobs. But people have to be ready for it.
So even in, in my own space, like, making sure that our team and our people are ready for that. Because if you aren't getting into that space, if you aren't with the curve, then you're gonna fall behind. And yes, you could be replaced in that sense that someone has done it and so now they're doing it better than you. And so if you're not using these tools, these resources to, to improve your efficiency and to just maximize your capability-- like for example, my team, maybe I don't need to hire a person. Maybe we can build out things that enable us to, with the same amount of people, to better serve more clientele.
So that's what I'm really trying to navigate. But it is scary thinking about that future and am I even gonna be ready and technically savvy enough to navigate that new future in the next year, in the next five, 10 years. And especially as someone who I've always had this, this goal of maybe someday, and I'm getting talked out of it very quickly, but maybe like being a Chief Information Security Officer at a large company or a Chief Product Security Officer, something like that. And yeah, quickly, I'm-- "Eh, we'll see." But it's those kind of things that, if we can navigate them correctly, may maybe that is something in my future. So that's, I think, one of my big fears and also passion projects right now.
And then also, same on that funding vein-- with my startup, we're experiencing that as well. And we actually, we had a lot of funding potential pre COVID. And then even though our technology-- like in some ways COVID brought the need for our technology to the forefront of people's minds-- it also killed a lot of funding opportunity. And so yeah, I mean, navigating that space of how do you get funding and then does it come from venture capital backed or equity, private equity, and I've seen those worlds. I even advise startups. So I mean, that is also probably one of the biggest challenges I'm facing currently as well.
[00:19:41] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Yeah. It's gonna be really interesting to see how things evolve, and it's been fascinating to read the news and see even the headlines where it's like, the FDA is using AI to review submissions and all sorts of things, and you really do wonder how we'll move forward and time will tell, I suppose.
[00:20:01] Garrett Schumacher: Yeah.
[00:20:02] Lindsey Dinneen: So you have stepped into quite a number of leadership roles fairly young in your career, if you don't mind me just saying so, and so I'm curious how you have navigated that growth for yourself. First of all, do you feel like you were a natural leader or were those skills things you developed along the way? And secondly, what advice might you have for younger leaders?
[00:20:27] Garrett Schumacher: Great questions. Yeah, definitely nothing is natural about it. I think for anyone, I mean, it's nothing that you just do and you're just like, "Yep, I'm a leader. That's easy." So it definitely something, just like all aspects of work and maturity, is you have to work on it. But I think how I got there was-- and someone told me a couple tips early in my career, I suppose-- and it was a couple are: find a mentor, and as the mentee you have to put in the effort. If you set up meetings and they're not there, whatever, like they're busy, and you are asking them to give their time for you. So, find mentors and then be a good mentee, meet up with them.
I had several people that were critical in my early career. One was Bunky Davis and she was amazing. She was no longer with us, but her and I grabbed coffee every single month. She had navigated biotech startups for like 50 years, was also just a phenomenal cyclist, Olympian, like just amazing. And we'd meet up every month for coffee without missing. And we did that for several years. And, and I had another mentor from the University of Colorado Boulder, Lloyd Thrall, who came from the Department of Defense, and just a spectacular, stellar guy, and we would go meet up all the time.
And so learning from these people I think I saw-- well, there's that. And then everybody has their bosses and their horror stories from work, whether that's a high school job or professional later on. And so you see the ways that people can be, you don't want to be. And so that, that makes it easy. But without having those mentors, yeah, I don't know if I would've exposed myself to the good ways, right, and the better ways, and be challenged. So that was really critical was finding a good mentor and then being a good mentee.
And then I think the other thing is interacting with people and just listening, active listening. So going to the professional shows and meeting people, listening to them, reading a lot of great books out there on how to be a leader, and you don't take all that exactly word for word, but there are golden little nuggets that you can just pick up out of all those things. So, no, definitely something that I have actively worked on and still am trying to work on. And then I'm constantly trying to listen and being that, have that open door policy for my people too. Because if I hire really smart people, I want them to do the thinking and therefore I need to listen.
[00:22:44] Lindsey Dinneen: There you go. I love it. All right, so. You've had a really interesting and exciting career so far, and you're obviously very passionate about medtech and cybersecurity and biotech and all those things, and I'm wondering if along the way there are any moments that really stand out to you as affirming, "Wow, I am in the right place at the right time."
[00:23:09] Garrett Schumacher: Yeah. Yeah. One was we had a really special project where and I won't give any names away, but basically my stepmother has an implant inside of her and it's it's not life sustaining, but it's one that you want working just so that your body's working normally, and so that you're not, not embarrassed. You can go into public spaces and be a normal person, right? And whether it's pain management, incontinence, those kind of things. So she had this implant and it was, she had one that came from the leading provider of that at the time. And it, the battery life, right, is supposed to last like 10 or 15 years, and it seemed like pretty much seven or eight was all she was getting out of it. And after decades of having far more surgeries than she needed, all the way up to the very last device she got in her-- it failed within the first year, I think-- so it was like, okay, time to pivot.
And we found this new company and they've become a huge leader in the space, recently acquired by another one of the big leaders in medtech in general. And we were hired to do the security work for that project. And the only reason that I actually found out-- because my stepmother was literally like in the process of getting this new device inside of her-- I was at that client's facility doing a pen testing and security testing engagement and some consulting and just visiting them. And I FaceTimed my family in the break room and there was a sign behind me and they're like, "Oh my gosh. We're literally, we just got that implanted in your stepmother like, a couple weeks ago. It's working great. She's so happy with it. It's smaller, it works better, all these things."
And it's like, "Wow." So I got to lead the security effort and what they're actually doing is adding remote programming capabilities so a doctor can, over the phone, be improving that therapy for you. But that leads to a lot of cybersecurity implications, right? That kind of connectivity. And so I gotta lead the security work on that for something that is in a near and dear, your family member. And it's those kind of things where it's not, you're not just helping patients. It's, I'm helping someone that I care very deeply about. And it hits home differently when it's not just, "Oh, I want this device to be secure. I want them to get FDA clearance. I want whatever." It's, "No, I need now, I need for my own family member for it to be the best." And it's not that project got special scrutiny from us-- we bring that to every project-- but it helps to have the actual experience of one of those projects.
[00:25:33] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. And to have that real-- well, you were mentioning it-- not just patients that I kept thinking, "Yeah. Not just patients, people," and the idea of it's sometimes probably necessary honestly, to have a little bit of separation from a clinical point of, "I'm helping all of these patients, and that's a really good thing." But then if you could take a step back and go, "And these patients are human beings that rely on what I'm doing for safety and for security and for this lifesaving, life enhancing device." That's-- what a gift to get to experience something like that.
[00:26:04] Garrett Schumacher: It is, it's especially like, if you work in the diabetes-- we've had several projects with insulin pumps-- and insulin's a drug that is, highly toxic if given in the wrong dosage. 99% of the world population would die if it's in the wrong dosage if it's too high. And the only reason the other 1% exist is 'cause they're insulin intolerant. They just, they don't respond to insulin and that's why they have their own type of diabetic issues. And I've got several cousins, a brother-in-law, that also use that stuff every day, rely on those kind of technologies. So, yeah, just it's a little bit more special when it's when you get to do that. But we try to do that for everyone. We try to think of everyone's that person that we're trying to help.
[00:26:42] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, absolutely. All right. Well, this has been so great, but pivoting the conversation a little bit, just for fun. Imagine that you were to be offered a million dollars to teach a masterclass on anything you want. What would you choose to teach and why?
[00:26:59] Garrett Schumacher: Ooh. Well, yeah, first of all, a million dollars for-- I feel like I, I'd have to go with something like that I know deeply, very deeply on. But okay, if I wanna have some fun here, I would say rock climbing, because rock climbing is my other big passion. It's the one thing that takes me away from a computer screen typically. And so if you're paying me a million dollars to teach rock climbing, A, these people really wanna learn how to be good rock climbers, so they're gonna be very engaged. And B, that's going to mean that I can go now actually make money on something that has only ever been a passion for me. So, that would be fun. That would be awesome.
[00:27:33] Lindsey Dinneen: Awesome.
[00:27:33] Garrett Schumacher: If you're offering, Lindsey, I'll accept.
[00:27:35] Lindsey Dinneen: Okay, deal, right? Yeah. I'm gonna have to earn my first million first, and then I'll let you know.
[00:27:40] Garrett Schumacher: I'll wait.
[00:27:41] Lindsey Dinneen: Okay, fair? Fair enough. What got you into rock climbing?
[00:27:45] Garrett Schumacher: Oh man. Well, so my mother was, I grew up in like a small farming town in the northeast corner of Colorado. There's not a mountain for, until you get to Denver area, right? In the summers, she worked at the local college, and in the summers she ran the ropes course and they had a giant rock wall. So, I mean, as a 10-year-old, I'm just hanging out there. I didn't know that there was routes or certain ways or techniques. I just, who can get up the fastest, right? But that was always fun. That was my summers. I always, and I was, shoot, I was always told I was a monkey. I was always on stuff climbing something. I've had my share of injuries from it, trust me.
And then in college, it just was natural. I went to CU Boulder, as I've probably already said, and a lot of outdoor climbing opportunities. A lot of, they, they built a new gym there inside the school. And so that then it became this thing where, oh, I can actually-- as you move away from high school sports, basketball and American football and those things, you miss that. You can miss some competitiveness and some team-based things. So now I had another active thing that I could-- and I, again, I wasn't so formal in technique or things like that-- so now I could work with people, socialize and work on that technique in something that I was able to do at that level, instead of, I'm not gonna go beat myself up playing football again.
So, yeah, I think that's where it came from. And then it's just been my big hobby ever since. And I mean, now I have a bunch of friends down in Austin, Texas, and we go on a big climbing trip once a year, and I see them once a year. It's fun. So it's like expanded my friend group and it keeps me sane.
[00:29:14] Lindsey Dinneen: Huh. Excellent. Yes. That's wonderful. All right. How do you wish to be remembered after you leave this world?
[00:29:22] Garrett Schumacher: Oh, that's a good one. How do you humbly answer that? When part of the answer I would wanna say is humble, but that's something I always try to work on, is I just wanna be a good guy. I want people to remember that, he was kind, considerate-- would do something at the drop of a hat for you without expecting anything in return-- just kind, generous. And I think a family guy would be a big one. My, my friends and family first and foremost. And maybe second to that, hardworking. Yeah.
[00:29:46] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. I love that. All right. And final question. What is one thing that makes you smile every time you see or think about it?
[00:29:55] Garrett Schumacher: Oh, my wife. I wake up to her every day and that's she's the best part about everything. So yeah, she's my favorite person, and I'm lucky enough to, when I'm not traveling, wake up next to her and see her at night, and that's the best part.
[00:30:08] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, absolutely. What a wonderful thing. Well, this has been a fantastic conversation, Garrett. I'm so thankful for your time today. Thank you for sharing some of your stories, some of your advice. And I just honestly wish you the most continued success as you work to change lives for a better world.
[00:30:26] Garrett Schumacher: Thank you. Thank you, Lindsey, for having me. This was my first podcast ever. So it went great. Yeah, it was fine.
[00:30:32] Lindsey Dinneen: Awesome. You rocked it. Good job. That's wonderful. All right, well, celebrating that and celebrating all your future successes to come. We are so honored to be making a donation on your behalf as a thank you for your time today to Save the Children, which works to end the cycle of poverty by ensuring communities have the resources to provide children with a healthy, educational, and safe environment. So thank you so much for choosing that charity to support, and thank you so much for being here and thank you for doing what you do.
[00:31:05] Garrett Schumacher: Thank you.
[00:31:07] Lindsey Dinneen: Excellent, and thank you also to our listeners for tuning in, and if you're feeling as inspired as I am, I'd love it if you'd share this episode with a colleague or two and we'll catch you next time.
[00:31:19] Dan Purvis: The Leading Difference is brought to you by Velentium Medical. Velentium Medical is a full service CDMO, serving medtech clients worldwide to securely design, manufacture, and test class two and class three medical devices. Velentium Medical's four units include research and development-- pairing electronic and mechanical design, embedded firmware, mobile app development, and cloud systems with the human factor studies and systems engineering necessary to streamline medical device regulatory approval; contract manufacturing-- building medical products at the prototype, clinical, and commercial levels in the US, as well as in low cost regions in 1345 certified and FDA registered Class VII clean rooms; cybersecurity-- generating the 12 cybersecurity design artifacts required for FDA submission; and automated test systems, assuring that every device produced is exactly the same as the device that was approved. Visit VelentiumMedical.com to explore how we can work together to change lives for a better world.
