Since many of Masimo Corp.’s largest customers are hospitals, Chief Executive Joe Kiani foresaw the potential damage of COVID-19 and took steps before many others in early 2020 to prepare, such as canceling conferences and setting up employees of his $15.5 billion-valued Irvine-based medtech firm (Nasdaq: MASI) to work from their homes.
What does he see now?
“The good news is people who get vaccinated don’t get hospitalized,” Kiani said last week in a meeting with our Peter J. Brennan and Audrey Kemp.
“Unfortunately, I think COVID will be something we have to deal with for the next decade,” he said.
“It will continue mutating. As long as people get vaccinated, hopefully it won’t be worse than the flu—it won’t kill you.”
For more on Kiani’s legal battles with Apple over the health monitoring technologies used in the Cupertino giant’s smartwatches, see Brennan’s front-page feature.
For the record: Kiani normally does not wear a watch, and he does not own an Apple Watch.
Our Aug. 9 print edition noted the $100M+ investment into a solar power-focused space project at the California Institute of Technology by Irvine Co.’s Donald Bren.
Other OC execs are also putting funds into Caltech; Kiani serves as a trustee for the Pasadena-based school and his Masimo Foundation in late June said it would help fund a summer program at Caltech for high school students and pre-college teachers.
While the school’s typical summer program—described as “a six-week deep dive into the process of university research”—takes place on-site at Caltech’s campus, the Irvine-based foundation’s funding has been used to turn the program into a hybrid one, using “the virtual learning techniques refined during the COVID-19 pandemic to expand participation” from 30 to 70 students and from four to 14 teachers, over the next three years.
This will help extend the program’s reach into underserved communities, including locations in Orange County.
The goal is “to make sure [Caltech’s] students, faculty, and even trustees come from all backgrounds that reflect our population,” Kiani said. “The best way to do that is to make sure the future pool is filled with diversity, starting with some of the underserved communities in our own backyard.”
Along with Bren and Kiani, other longtime OC-based trustees at Caltech include Fariborz Maseeh and George Argyros.
New trustees at the school include Mason Smith, a 2009 grad who now is head of software engineering at Irvine’s TGS Management Co., the under-the-radar quantitative trading firm that’s headed by local multibillionaire C. Frederick Taylor. Smith earlier this year joined the board as a young alumni trustee.
CORRECTION: The Aug. 9 edition of the Business Journal incorrectly stated that the Newport Beach Marriott Hotel & Spa in Newport Center was closed during the property’s renovation, which is now underway.
The property remains open for guests and events during the renovation.
