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Pransky: What did you formally train at and how did you first get into business? (Figure 1)
Goffer: I already was quite an experienced researcher due to my work at RAFAEL Advanced Defense Systems, Israel, www.rafael.co.il/ working on adaptive antenna array.
In 1988, I came to the USA, where I did my PhD dissertation in phased arrays at Drexel University. I did Post-Doc work in fused multiple Kalman filters, also at Drexel. I came back to Israel in 1991 and landed at the MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) division of Elscint Ltd., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elscint. Elscint was an Israeli technology company that manufactured and sold medical imaging solutions. MRI systems at the time were large, a fact that motivated me to develop a compact MRI for real-time brain surgery for use in a standard operating room. Consequently, in 1995, I founded Odin Medical Technologies (www.crunchbase.com/organization/odin-medical-technologies) and developed and commercialized a new intraoperative MRI system (Figure 2).
Odin was my first startup company, and it became the school for my learning business. Though I had been used to managing research and development (R&D) teams at RAFAEL and Elscint, and was a project manager as a captain in the Israeli Air Force, in my role as Odin’s President and CEO, I was the pupil, making mistakes but gaining valuable lessons.
Pransky: How did you come up with the ReWalk (http://rewalk.com) wearable robotic exoskeleton?
Goffer: I was with Odin for four very intense years as its CEO and CTO; an all-terrain vehicle (ATV) accident in 1997 left me a quadriplegic, and following that, I decided to move on.
After the injury, it took me a couple of years to get used to being in a wheelchair and I couldn’t understand why the wheelchair was the only solution for the paralyzed. From my home, I started to design a concept of an exoskeleton. I had to calculate whether the solution was feasible, e.g. whether normal-size batteries sufficed and whether the market size was big enough. Physics told me that my idea would work and a marketing expert friend of mine reassured me that the market was huge. I had these two elements – the feasibility of the solution and the promise of the big market – and I started to design it....