On this episode of Fortune’s Leadership Next podcast, Michal Lev-Ram talks to Joe Kiani, founder, chairman and CEO of Masimo, a medical devices company, about the massive challenges he’s facing: his company’s patent infringement suit against Apple and a proxy battle being waged by Masimo shareholders who are agitating for a change in management.
Why did Kiani decide to take on the tech giant in court? He says that Apple recruited Masimo’s CTO as well as 25 other employees and then infringed “our IP…and a lot of our trade secrets are now at Apple.” Kiani adds: “Given that we were going forward with our consumer plan, we didn’t want to be competing with our own technology.”
Lev-Ram and Kiani also discuss how AI will change health care, leading during challenging time, and the CEO’s own origin story which includes starting college when he was just 15. “My math was really good,” says Kiani. Co-host Alan Murray was off this week.
Note about this week’s episode: Apple continues to deny Masimo’s IP claims. Additionally, Apple defended its standards for suppliers, telling Fortune it conducted thousands of assessments and audits last year to ensure healthy labor practices. Apple disputes Kiani’s characterization of its App Store commissions.
Listen to the episode or read the transcript below.
Transcript
Michal Lev-Ram: Welcome to Leadership Next, the podcast about the changing world of business leadership. I’m Michal Lev-Ram.
Today I am flying solo. Alan Murray could not make it, my co-host, but on today’s episode, really fascinating conversation. I talked to Joe Kiani. He’s the founder and CEO of a company you may not have heard about, but it’s called Masimo, and it’s a medical device company. More specifically, they make patient monitoring devices. And while it’s been a relatively quiet company, a little bit under the radar unless you’re in that industry, they made a lot of noise more recently because they went up against a much, much bigger corporation, Apple, in a patent infringement case, which has been pretty complicated.
But Kiani has got a lot of other complications on his hands internally as well. There has been a proxy battle waged by some shareholders who are agitating for change at the company and change in its management. And this has really been a tumultuous period. He’s the founder of the company as well. So, he’s been running it for quite a long time, for several…
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