Member Spotlight: Casey Qadir

The Origin Story

Mike: Amazing. Well, hey Casey. Thank you so much. So, why don’t we just kind of start off? I’d love to hear about what you’re building.

Casey: I’m founder and CEO of Hubly Surgical, and we have an auto-stop technology that has been demonstrated to be 100% effective in the surgical setting. Basically, we have drills that stop automatically upon breaking through the skull or other bone to prevent plunge injuries.

Mike: That is incredible. Whenever I watch—I’m obsessed with The Pitt right now. Have you seen it?

Casey: I actually have not seen it, but I think I know where you’re going with this.

Mike: Well, it’s an incredible show. You should watch it. But whenever I see people do—especially like neurosurgery—and they’re supposed to just drill into the head and stop by feel, I’m almost just like, how do people live with that type of risk? How does that actually happen?

Casey: I know. Well, the standard of care for emergency neurosurgery is a hand-crank drill, and they use that in The Pitt. When that episode came out, I had everyone I’ve ever met text me about it, so I have to get into the HBO writers’ room and let them know that they’re out of date.

Mike: Well, this podcast will not help with that—maybe one day—but I can’t wait to see you on TV. Casey, tell me this: how’d you get started? How’d you come up with this idea?

Casey: So my background—I was at undergrad at Northwestern. I was studying neuroscience and computer science, planning to get a PhD. This was about eight years ago now. While I was there, my grandfather’s Parkinson’s disease became very progressed, and so as a family we explored DBS, deep brain stimulation, as a highly effective surgical treatment for Parkinson’s, but we ended up electing not to move forward with the treatment because it has a really high complication rate. It was in learning about that procedure from the patient side that I learned that for DBS, surgeons are drilling up to ten holes in a patient’s skull, and they’re just relying on feel to estimate when to stop drilling once they’ve broken through that skull.

Jordan: My friend—

Casey: I have a kid too. She’s actually sitting right here, but she’s being very quiet.

Mike: Yours has never behaved in mine, either, or anything.

Casey: But I totally get it. So, anyway—in learning that doctors are using power tools or hand-crank drills, and they have to rely on this tactile feedback alone, that seemed ridiculous to me in the 21st century, given we have robots that can do surgery, and yet we don’t have drills that stop when they’re supposed to stop. So I teamed up with the chief neurosurgery resident at Northwestern Hospital, and he independently said, ‘We’re using these hand-crank drills in the ICU, and it’s junior residents who are primarily doing the procedure for emergency neurosurgery. There’s got to be a better way.’ Together, he and I came up with the very early idea—the early prototypes of improved drills that can stop automatically upon breaking through skull and bone, so that they have added safety for the patient.

Building the MVP

Mike: That’s incredible. Take me back to the early days—the MVP for a drill that automatically stops during surgery. What does that look like? How did you guys start? It’s very different than software, where the MVP could be completely broken, and that’s okay.

Casey: Well, yeah, the early prototypes were pretty ramshackle. We were using the shop at our university—the woodworking shop. We were using the 3D printers that the entrepreneurship center offered for free usage, and we were just hobbling together—you know, this is the brainstorming phase—hobbling together napkin sketches to see if they worked. We ended up coming up with several different methods of doing auto-stop. We had different friction-based mechanisms, different lock-and-key mechanical ways of doing auto-stop, and it became clear pretty early on that the way this was really going to work was through firmware—having a microchip on an algorithm—so that friction was not an element. We needed an auto-stop that was absolutely 100% effective, that was not variable based on fluids or humidity, since obviously this is a surgical setting and there’s a lot of fluids flying around. It was really when I brought my CTO on, Tyler, that we were totally off to the races. Tyler’s brilliant, and he’s a super, super experienced medical device R&D engineer. I really give him credit—the three of us work together, but really Tyler’s the one who built the drill that we use today. We ended up patenting several—almost ten different methods of doing auto-stop. The one we selected to commercialize was not only 100% effective, but also highly scalable from a manufacturing perspective, and we needed a method that was inexpensive to manufacture. So that method—not to bury the lead—is a microchip in the drill that measures the current draw on the motor as you’re drilling through bone. It’s that relationship between current, resistance, and torque, where the instant the drill bit breaks through bone, there’s a sudden drop in resistance and increase in current, and that change is what tells the motor that it’s through, so the motor shuts off. We also have a patented drill bit geometry, so the drill bit stops—you can’t push any further once the motor shuts off. There’s a light on the back of the drill that changes colors as you’re drilling for extra ease of use, that turns red, and there you go. It’s basically turned the drilling part of neurosurgery into a straightforward five-second procedure where you can just focus on the patient.

Mike: Makes sense. All of that suspense and drama from The Pitt scene is now going to be completely broke. I’m curious—how long did that testing, brainstorming, woodshop phase last?

Casey: For a long time. Let’s see—okay, so I met Amit and started working on the idea at the end of 2017, and we spent about three years from when we met to when we had our final version that we started pushing through FDA testing. We started our FDA testing in 2021, so it took a while. But we were not full-time until I went full-time in December of 2019.

Mike: Got it.

Casey: And then Tyler, my CTO, joined in the middle of 2020.

The Fundraising Rollercoaster

Mike: Got it. What kept you guys going during that experimental phase—the wandering-in-the-wilderness phase? What kept you believing?

Casey: I mean, that we were solving a real problem. I basically graduated college a year early so that I could pursue this full-time. I was at the beginning of sophomore year of college when we started working on the idea. I had two years of school left from what I could finish with my degree. In that time, we kept doing customer discovery, we kept interviewing neurosurgeons, I was doing pitch competitions, and we had some early success there. So there was a lot of early evidence that this was a real problem, that the regulatory pathway and the reimbursement pathway were navigable, and then the technical problem was fun. It’s actually a little more convoluted—we did have a final MVP ready to go by the end of 2019.

Mike: Okay.

Casey: And we paused R&D. We were ready to go into FDA testing. I started fundraising. I did an accelerator in the Bay Area. Our demo day was May of 2020. As you might imagine, with the pandemic, we delayed demo day—pushed it back, it became virtual—I think September of 2020. So I pushed off the fundraise for several months. We were operating on tiny grants during that six-month time to keep moving the business forward and start looking at optimizing for manufacturability. In October of 2020, right after the demo day, I lined up 50 investor meetings for myself, and I remember meeting number three was a yes, meeting number six was a yes, and then I got four nos in a row.

Mike: You remember the specific meetings? That’s incredible.

Casey: I remember—it was very salient, because by the end of the 50 meetings, I had run out of people to pitch. Usually, obviously, I’ve raised a lot of money since then, and how it works is you get yeses and those people introduce you to more people, and so on. So I got to the end of the 50 meetings, and I was like, I don’t know what to do. I failed to raise the round, and so we didn’t have enough money to do all of our FDA testing, which requires a lot of upfront capital. I’d always ask for feedback from all the investors, and they all said I was too early. I went back to them and said, ‘Listen, I have been unable to raise this round. I need genuine feedback from you. Clearly you took this meeting knowing what stage we’re at, so there’s a world in which we wouldn’t have been too early. If you had to give me any other feedback other than we’re too early—what would that feedback be?’ And I got different answers, but the one thing that kept popping up over and over again was that they thought our COGS were too high. They were like, ‘You need to price your product higher to get a margin that makes sense. In this day and age, in COVID, hospitals are very cost-constrained. I just don’t think it’s going to work. I don’t think you’re going to be able to get that much of a premium, and if you have to reduce your cost down, then your margins aren’t good enough for a med device company.’

Mike: Yeah.

Casey: So Tyler and I went back to the drawing board at the very end of 2020, and Tyler reinvented the drill with that current-monitoring algorithm, and that cut our COGS by 80%. So we were then able to tell investors, ‘You’re right—because of COVID, especially, hospitals are especially cost-constrained right now, but we don’t need to be 4x the price of the existing standard. We can still get a premium and have fantastic margins, and there’s room to discount if we need to, and we’ll still be making great margins.’ So I went back to all the investors, and then I raised the round.

Mike: Many of those 48 that had said no ended up converting?

Casey: That’s a good question—I actually don’t know off the top of my head. I know that one of those investors in particular really made the difference, because he came in and led the round right away, and because of that—his name’s Nathan, shout-out—I was able to fill the rest of the round pretty quickly.

Mike: That’s incredible. I’m so glad we went down this rabbit hole. So you tried to raise a round, you had 50-plus meetings, you didn’t get it across the finish line. You went back to those same people that said no, which I think is really hard for founders to do. You took that feedback, reconfigured the product and the company, redid it, and that’s what got you across the finish line.

Casey: Yes, exactly. So when you say how long did the R&D phase take—it’s a little convoluted, because we weren’t full-time—no one was full-time for two years when we were working on the idea in the background, de-risking it for ourselves before we took the plunge. Right after I went full-time, we had the beta ready to go, our MVP ready to go, and then a year later we were like, nevermind, scrap what we just did for the last year. But it wasn’t a total waste—Tyler, my CTO, was able to basically reinvent the product in maybe two months, which was incredible. And obviously all of the customer development work and regulatory preparedness we’d done in the last year was still useful.

Landing the First Customers

Mike: That’s incredible, I love it, Casey. I’m curious—so now you have the product, you have patents, etc. Let’s fast forward a little bit. You still have to sell to hospital systems, which I imagine are not the easiest customers, and you’re young, fresh out of school. Tell me how you got those first customers—how you started to get the business side, the revenue side, going.

Casey: Yes—it really helps that my co-founder, Amit, is a neurosurgeon, so we really started off with all of that customer discovery. Amit talked to his buddies from residency and med school, and I’d been speaking to all of these people, showing up at neurosurgery conferences. This is before the company had any money, so I would just show up in Scottsdale and walk into the conference and start talking to people.

Mike: Just walk in—you wouldn’t have a ticket?

Casey: Yeah.

Mike: I love it. Great.

Casey: Yeah—at this one particular conference, to save money on everything, I just paid for my flights, and then I stayed with my high school friend’s grandma, who had retired to Scottsdale, and I just walked into the conference, and no one stopped me.

Mike: Amazing.

Casey: And that was how I got a lot of early feedback, and all of that feedback informed the development. We had to distill down exactly what features we needed to have versus what features were nice-to-have but weren’t significant COGS. It was weird figuring that out along the way. That was where I had my early network of—let’s call them—waitlist customers. We had all of these surgeons that I’d met through my co-founder, Amit, or through cold-reaching-out, or cold-talking to people at conferences, who were really excited and said, ‘You’re solving a real problem, let me know how you progress.’ I think that was kind of neat for them too—when I first started doing this, I was eighteen, and they were like, ‘Oh, you’re just an eighteen-year-old engineering student,’ and now they’ve been able to see that grow into a real company that’s generating millions in revenue and saving thousands of patients.

Lessons as a Founder

Mike: Wow, that’s amazing. Casey, I’m curious—now you’ve been through a lot of ups and downs, like any founder. What’s been the biggest or maybe hardest lesson you’ve learned?

Casey: The biggest or hardest lesson I’ve learned—okay, let’s see. I think that in the beginning I was very receptive to—I still am very receptive to—feedback. One thing I had to learn was that you’re going to get a lot, especially as a founder, a lot of conflicting advice from a lot of different people, and figuring out how to distill that down—exactly how many times you need to hear something before you say, ‘Okay, that’s enough data, I’m going to radically make this change’—or choosing your mentors, choosing who’s going to be on your advisory board or your board of directors. I think that’s been a soft skill I’ve developed over time. At the beginning I was like, I want all the advice, I was very ready to listen to everyone, and then as soon as I started getting conflicting advice, I was like, okay, I’m going to have to make some choices here.

Mike: Do you have a framework for what advice you actually listen to versus what advice you put into the filing cabinet?

Casey: Yeah, I think a lot of it boils down to: has this person done this before? When it comes to fundraising advice, I pretty much only listen to founders who have successfully fundraised, or investors—investors who don’t have a conflict of interest. Some of my favorite investors are people who were medical device investors for a long time, and now they’ve moved on to a fund that only does longevity, or end-of-life, or digital healthcare—so her fund is not a fit for us, totally different wheelhouse, but she has that experience, so she has no conflict—she’s going to give me totally candid advice, and she has that experience. That’s one example. I think I do that for every piece of advice, every sounding board I’m trying to get: has this person done this before, have they done it successfully? That’s probably the number one rule I have for myself. The other thing is, when I’m meeting with people, I ask myself: is this something I already knew? Is this something I could have come up with myself? Are they making sense—is it passing the common-sense sniff test? That’s kind of one way I distill it down. There’s a ton of brilliant people in medical device, which is the only space I really know, so luckily I have a lot of options of whose advice I want to listen to, and people have been really willing to help—I’ve had a very good experience.

Staying Sane as a Founder

Mike: Amazing. Well, Casey—I know Zara needs you, so I’ll skip a bunch of questions, but my two last ones are this: this is an insane job being a founder, and you’re dealing with real consequences, real stakes. Do you have a hack, a hobby—what do you do to keep yourself sane?

Casey: I’ve done a bunch of stuff. At the very beginning—I’m a big nerd, I’m not doing myself any favors for sounding cool—I did a math master’s with my dad, nights and weekends, for the first three years that I was doing the company, and that was great, because it was activating a different part of my brain that I’d kind of missed from my studies. Because once we finalized the product, or really once I hired my CTO, the majority of my job is meetings—sales, sales operations—but it’s meeting with people who are then doing the actual work. So it was a lot of fun, taking math classes.

Mike: A master’s—you get a master’s degree in math?

Casey: Yes.

Mike: As a side hobby. Amazing.

Casey: Yeah—Johns Hopkins had a remote engineering-for-professionals program, so my dad and I did that together. My dad and I hadn’t lived in the same place since high school—I went to college, then moved—so it was great hanging out with my dad, and my mom in the background of Zoom calls.

Mike: That sounds fun. It really sounds like dedicating yourself to another passion, another pursuit, in the very little time that you have.

Casey: Yeah, that’s what I did for the first three years, and then I just read a lot after that was done—I was reading an insane amount the last year—I guess I shouldn’t say insane, other people read more—but for me it was, I was reading like two books a week. And then I had a baby—she was born in December—and I’ve maybe read like one book a month since then.

Mike: That is—I would not call having a baby a side project, but yeah, having something to take your mind off of the company, I think, is the common thread.

Casey: Yeah, totally.

Casey Qadir is the Co-Founder and CEO of Hubly Surgical, neuro-spine surgical safety company with uniquely 100% effective automatic-stop for surgical drills. Since launching in 2024, Hubly Drills have saved an estimated 8,000+ patient lives. She founded Hubly during her undergrad at Northwestern University following a family connection to the unmet need. She previously worked as a software engineer and spent years in neuroscience research focused on Parkinson’s disease and neuro-implantable devices. Based in New York City, Casey has been an active member of NYC Founders Club since 2026.