When Joe Kiani resigned from Masimo a year ago, the move sent ripples through both the medical technology sector and the business community at large. For decades, Kiani had been synonymous with Masimo’s culture of relentless innovation, having built the company from a startup into a global leader in patient monitoring. His departure raised questions: what would become of Masimo without its visionary founder, and perhaps more intriguingly, what would Kiani do next?
The answers have unfolded in unexpected ways. Since stepping away, Kiani has immersed himself in a series of ventures that span disciplines as diverse as regenerative medicine, video conferencing, and critical care therapeutics. His new chapter underscores a broader truth about entrepreneurship, that innovation rarely stops with a single company, and that the instincts of a true entrepreneur can find expression in multiple arenas at once.
Consider his founding of Willow Laboratories, where he has taken on the position of executive chairman. The company is focused on reshaping healthy lifestyles with respect to diabetes risk mitigation, an area of medicine where incremental progress has long been the norm. Kiani’s involvement signals a push toward breakthroughs that could alter the daily lives of millions of people impacted by the disease. At the same time, he has stepped into the CEO role at Like Minded Labs, where the team is preparing to launch a new digital collaboration product.
Kiani’s influence is also visible in more specialized corners of health care. At CDX Medical Technologies, he has joined the board to help advance extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) therapy, a life-support technology that has become especially vital in critical care. His position on the board of My01 reflects his interest in helping clinicians save limbs and lives by detecting the lack of perfusion to the limb after an injury. Meanwhile, his ongoing support of SMSBiotech ties directly to his long-standing fascination with regenerative medicine, as the company develops therapies rooted in novel adult human stem cell technologies. Most recently, he accepted a board seat at IRIDAMED, where the focus is on MRI-compatible infusion pumps and monitors, yet another reminder that his eye for innovation is as much about detail as it is about vision.
The scope of these commitments is striking, but the contrast with what has unfolded at Masimo is perhaps even more telling. Since activist hedge fund Politan Capital took control, the company has had its fair share of news. Including layoffs and halted development on many of its future products. Those decisions included discontinuing technologies that had already earned FDA clearance, such as the Opioid Halo, a device capable of detecting overdoses and alerting caregivers, and the Stork newborn monitor, designed to prevent sudden infant death syndrome by bringing hospital-grade monitoring into the home. Other products, including the W1 wearable and the Freedom line of consumer health devices, were also scrapped.
This divergence between Kiani’s trajectory and Masimo’s new course raises broader questions about the nature of entrepreneurship in a corporate environment increasingly influenced by short-term financial pressures. For Kiani, entrepreneurship has never been merely about building companies; it has been about solving pressing problems with persistence and vision. His current slate of endeavors suggests he is still committed to that ethos, even if the setting has changed.
One year on, what emerges is a portrait of a founder who refuses to be defined by the loss of his first innovation. Instead, Joe Kiani seems intent on reminding both his peers and the industries he touches that innovation is not a finite resource. It is a way of approaching the world, a refusal to accept that today’s tools are sufficient for tomorrow’s challenges. For entrepreneurs watching from the sidelines, his story offers a lesson in resilience and reinvention: sometimes the end of one chapter is not a conclusion at all, but a prelude to a broader canvas of possibility.
