How Did I Get Here?

Dr. Rodney Perkins

Medical entrepreneur
  • Education
  • Bosse High School, class of 1953, Evansville, Ind.
  • Indiana University, class of 1957, Bloomington
  • Indiana University School of Medicine, class of 1961, Indianapolis
  • Work Experience
  • 1963–67
    Medical resident, Stanford University Medical School
  • 1968–93
    Doctor, ear surgeon, private practice
  • 1975–93
    Co-founder, Collagen
  • 1982–2004
    Founder, chief executive officer, chairman, Laserscope
  • 1986–99
    Founder and chairman, ReSound
  • 1988–Present
    Professor of surgery, Stanford
  • 1994–2004
    Founder, California Ear Institute at Stanford
  • 2002–Present
    Founder and chief medical officer, EarLens
  • 2011–Present
    Founder, CEO, chairman, Soundhawk
  • Life Lessons
  • “It’s very hard to beat someone who’s intelligent and passionate about what they’re doing.”
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  • “Most successful enterprises come from someone seeing a need and acting on it.”
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  • School photo, 1948
    “My class ranking was in the middle, but I did really well in science.”
  • “You’ve heard of injecting collagen for wrinkles? I was trying to develop a biosynthetic eardrum out of collagen, and it ended up that injectable collagen was useful to get rid of wrinkles. We went public.”
  • Performing surgery with a laser, 1981
  • “I thought, as a Faustian, how many lives can you live in one body? I decided to develop surgical devices full time.”
  • “I’ve started 16 or 17 companies. I had to make a list.”
  • “Hearing aids are $3,000 each. Ours is a high-end hearing product for $350, and it connects to your phone. You can use Siri on it.”
  • “At the time, you’d put people in ice baths to prepare the heart for open-heart surgery. I redesigned the blood oxygenator to cool or warm the blood, and entered it into an American Medical Association student research competition. I won first prize.”
  • With his wife, Sherry, and Hewlett-Packard co-founder David Packard, in British Columbia, 1994
  • “We were the first company to introduce high-tech signal processing into the hearing aid industry.”
  • “It’s like a contact lens on your eardrum [that] you activate with light pulses. It more than doubles the frequency range of any known hearing aid. It just won FDA approval this October.”
  • With Sherry and Tony Blair, 2011