Nick Delmonico wasn’t sure which professional direction he would follow upon entering the full-time Global MBA program at Temple University’s Fox School of Business.
A passion for healthcare ultimately led to him to creating Strados Labs, a company dedicated to health technology for improved management of asthma.
Delmonico’s pursuit of a Fox MBA, with a concentration in Healthcare Management, will conclude with graduation in May. His career, however, is only beginning.
After struggling to manage his asthma as a child, Delmonico had sought to create a product that could enable asthmatics to better understand their symptoms. With the help of his Strados Labs team, Delmonico committed to a plan of creating smart-sensor wearable technology that provides better data in real time about conditions, while improving asthma management and reducing the risk of complications.
The 27-year-old first pitched his idea for Strados Labs at a Thomas Jefferson University Hospital health hackathon event, where he met eventual Strados cofounder Dr. Kan Au.
“It was nice that Temple and the Fox School exposed (students) to that event,” said Delmonico. “They encouraged us to go the event. After Kan and I met at that health hack, a few of the people that I work with said, ‘Hey this is a good idea. We should keep working on it,’ and that’s what we did.”
At the 2016 Be Your Own Boss Bowl, a Temple-wide business plan competition, Strados Labs finished in second place in the track designated for staff, graduate students, and alumni. Then, Delmonico took his idea to WeWork’s Creator Awards, where he won the Incubate Award — an award for entrepreneurs with innovative ideas that need funding. The award granted Strados Labs a $36,000 prize.
“It validates that we’ve put in the right amount of work so far,” Delmonico said. “We’ve been able to show that asthmatics, parents of asthmatics, and healthcare providers want this, but now it’s about determining exactly what they want and how exactly that is going to look, feel, and function.”
Currently, the Strados Labs team is working diligently with the hope of gaining more capital — a move that could take its products out of the beta-testing stage and into the market, and making an innovative solution available to the public.
“You don’t always need to have the best idea, but you need to know how to solve the right problems with the right solutions,” Delmonico said. “Sometimes, it just takes a few discussions with people in a certain area and then brainstorming ways to fix that problem.”