Larry Lawson’s nearly five decades of being in healthcare’s entrepreneurial trenches leaves him with a lot of practical advice, he says, and that’s something he’s ready to pass on to the next generation.
“I can tell them what not to do,” he says only half-jokingly. “That’s critically important.”
Lawson started his career at Johnson & Johnson in 1970, during which time he says he volunteered at Houston’s Ben Taub Hospital in order to study the environment in which his company’s products were being used. He ended up in the ER, eventually working with city leaders to develop its paramedic program. He says he often rode with the EMTs on their nightly rounds.
For the next two decades, Lawson held executive positions in companies such as LifeMed Technologies and Sysco. In 2004, he founded eCardio, a heart arrythmia monitoring company that merged with Preventice Solutions last year. He then stepped down as Preventice’s chairman and CEO following an investment by Boston Scientific.
Now, the semi-professional musician and former collegiate cheerleader has turned his attention to mentoring and investing full-time. This summer, Lawson joined the ranks of advisors for the Texas Medical Center’s Innovation Institute, where he says he’s especially eager to work with young entrepreneurs at the accelerator TMCx.
This month, Jack Gill, who founded the Houston-based super-angel investor group Goose Society, invited Lawson to join the gaggle. (Goose is short for Grand Order of Successful Entrepreneurs and counts, among them, Compaq Computers founder Rod Canion and Nancy Chang, who founded Houston biotech Tanox.)
“Since early life, Larry Lawson has been a visionary, a natural salesman, and a well organized go-getter,” says Gill, the founder of Silicon Valley’s Vanguard Ventures and an entrepreneurship professor at Rice University. “Larry Lawson brings extraordinary skills, deal flow, vision, and judgment that greatly expands investment opportunities in the life sciences for the Goose Society.”
