A young surgeon in residency at Virginia Mason in the early 1980s watched how large a cut a patient needed just to let him in. Frederic Moll said later he was struck by the size of the incision and the injury done merely to get inside the body. It bothered him enough to change his career.
He grew up in Seattle, the child of two pediatricians, and went to Lakeside School, where Bill Gates and Paul Allen were schoolmates. He studied at Berkeley and the University of Washington, then left residency to develop the safety trocar, a device that helped make laparoscopic surgery possible.
He grew up in Seattle, the child of two pediatricians, and went to Lakeside School, where Bill Gates and Paul Allen were schoolmates.
By 1994 he was at Guidant, and he had found a prototype at SRI International. Nobody else wanted it. In the early 1990s SRI had shown the system to many venture capitalists and, as one company history puts it, no one expressed serious interest until Moll. Moll himself first saw little commercial value in it, though he thought it had wow factor.
What almost nobody remembers is that its first purpose was not the one he wanted. The system was meant for remote surgery on wounded soldiers. Moll saw a different use, and Guidant, his employer, would not back it.
So in 1995 he left. Mayfield Fund, which had backed him before, paired him with John Freund, a Harvard-trained executive who negotiated the SRI licence, and with Robert Younge, an engineer. They incorporated in November 1995 and raised about $5 million from Mayfield and Sierra Ventures.
Then reality. Early sales were slow. The system was expensive and its tools could be used only a few times, costing about $1,500 an operation. Gallbladder surgery, the first target, did not pan out because cheaper laparoscopic tools existed. In 1999 the company sold ten systems in Europe. In 2000, a month before its IPO, rival Computer Motion sued for patent infringement, which made customers nervous. The IPO raised $46 million anyway, and the FDA cleared da Vinci for general laparoscopic surgery that year. The two companies merged in 2003.
Success has had a price. A da Vinci cost about $1.5 million, and Intuitive paid $43 million in 2018 to settle shareholder suits over unreported injuries. Moll left in 2002 to found Hansen Medical. For 2025 Intuitive reported revenue of about $10.1 billion.
The close is a small one. Moll did not invent the machine. He kept looking at a wound until he could see what the machine was for.