The Long View: Interview with Gary Guthart, Chief Executive Officer of Intuitive Surgical Inc.

This podcast is for general information purposes only and is not advice.  Outside of the United States, this episode is intended for investment professionals use only. Not for further distribution. Please listen to the end for complete information.

Cold OPEN: … “What's the job of a leader? And I think it has three elements in it. One is, a leader should lead to a future that is better for the organization. Two is; they need to know how the work gets done. You can't lead what you don't understand. And the final point is you need to understand people. You need to appreciate them, and you need to cultivate a culture of excellence and cohesion in your teams.”

“The Angle” Music

Eric Veiel

Welcome back to The Angle from T. Rowe Price, a podcast for curious investors. I'm Eric Veiel, head of global investments and chief investment officer here at T Rowe Price Associates. In these special episodes of The Angle, I'll be talking to CEOs and industry leaders as we pull back the curtain on what it takes to lead a company in today's fast paced and ever-changing business landscape. Each episode features candid conversations, real world insights, inspiring stories of success, and hopefully a little fun.

In this episode of The Angle, we are joined by Gary Guthart, Ph.D. Gary is the chief executive officer at Intuitive Surgical, a global leader in the robotic surgery market, and is best known for its flagship da Vinci robot. In 2000, the company's surgical system became the first robotic system cleared by the FDA for general laparoscopic surgery. With nearly 17 million procedures performed on da Vinci systems, as of the end of 2024, and over 10,000 intuitive systems in hospitals globally, Intuitive Surgical is transforming the health care system.

Gary's been with Intuitive Surgical since 1996; started out on the first engineering team. He was appointed president and chief operating officer in 2006 and then CEO in 2010. While most of his career has been at Intuitive, Gary scientific career began as a teenager working for NASA. A story we will get to in our conversation for sure.

Gary, thank you for joining me today on The Angle; really excited to have you, here to talk about your journey to becoming CEO, your learnings along the way, and the innovations happening in the robotic surgery marketplace. For perspective, when I joined T. Rowe Price, 20 years ago, Intuitive Surgical was $5 a share, and here we are, comfortably over $500. So, congratulations - amazing value creation. And we certainly thank you for, for what you've done with the company.

Gary Guthart

Thank you so much for the invitation. I'm excited for the conversation today. And, happy to represent the thousands of people at Intuitive who, deliver all that value you just talked about.

Eric Veiel

That's great. Why don't we start at the beginning? The company was founded in 1995 to test how robotic surgery could be used in a noninvasive way. You were employee 11, I believe, and joined, you know, right at the start here. I have to imagine that the idea of robotic surgery at that point was probably somewhat of an alien concept, or at least, a new, a very new concept. And there probably a lot of naysayers. Was there a point where in the journey where you can say, you know, this was a real turning point? Was it either a development that you all had or some, you know, clinician of note that really brought this forward?

Gary Guthart

There were a couple of really important pivots. I'll speak personally to my own commitment. You know, how did I get committed to the idea? It's not the question you ask. And then we'll go through and say, you know, how did the field start to to move through what we think of as an adoption curve? So for me, I had first been exposed to it. I'm a mathematician by training. I had been first exposed as a young person at a research institute. It's called Stanford Research Institute, and I have good micro assembly skills. I'm good with my hands. And they had been struggling with how to control this robot to do this kind of thing we're talking about. And they showed me a demo, and the demo was to try to suture and anastomosis on a femoral artery of a rodent. So, you can imagine it’s really hard. This is all really small. You're using thread that's the hit, the width of a human hair. And then they moved me over to this prototype they had. And it looked like something out of a science fiction movie. And you sat down and you use this sort of surgeon's console and you had a. Even at this time, a 3D view through cameras, 3D cameras of what was going on, it was all magnified, and you do that same task of suturing, and it was immensely easier. And that was a road to the Damascus moment for me. You stood up and you go, wow, I get it.

This is something. This other thing is really hard now, miles and miles away from being a product that could be clinically used. But that idea of we could if we could replicate that experience somewhere, that was the aha moment for me. It was well before any business plan or how big is the market, or any of those kinds of things, like here's core technology, could we do something with it?

The adoption curve inside of surgery really came from some pioneering surgeons. And, one of the leaders here was a surgeon named Dr. Mani Menon, he was a urologist at Henry Ford Hospital; had been trained at Johns Hopkins down the street here. And he was looking at minimally invasive urology. He looked at what he could do using old technique, which is a big incision. It's about a six-inch incision, from the belly button down to the pubic bone in a man. That was what you would get if you needed your prostate out. And he compared what was the patient priority, what was the outcome for open? What was the patient priority? What was the outcome for robotic assisted prostatectomy? And he got great results and he published them. And you would think, well, that's a great story. And he published it and it's all over, and you'd be wrong.

So he published the data and he was immediately attacked. It's not clear. We don't like the methodology. It's not clear that this adds any value. And, several groups then started to go out and see if they could replicate his results, some with positive intent, some with – “I'm going to debunk intent”. It's a little bit like cold fusion, right? Okay. There was a claim. Let's go see if we can get it. And one of the, the follow-on validators was a highly skilled group of minimally invasive surgeons laparoscopic in Southern California, city of home. And this team, they were very skilled in the manual technique and they, they bought a robot from us. They implemented it and their hypothesis was, if you're good at lab, you don't need this. Why spend all the money? And what they found when they did it was – oops we’re actually getting better results, even than our own lab. And to their credit, they published that. They said, turns out that this is an efficacious technique. Here are some some tweaks and tunes. But this is actually quite exciting. So then we started to see momentum start to compound.

Eric Veiel

So maybe fast forward now to today. Where, where we are. So you just launched Da Vinci five, about a year ago I think, your most recent, iteration. Maybe for our listeners, start by explaining how that machine has evolved versus those earlier ones, maybe the key features that it has. Try to take us inside of what it's like, to use that. And then we'll, we'll chat a little bit more about how it's, being deployed.

Gary Guthart

Da Vinci five. It's named for the generation of product it is. This is the fifth generation of product da Vinci five and and, just launched last year. What are the major elements of it? We are taking advantage of technology adoption curves, that both we invent and our technology partners help invent. So, it is higher precision than anything we've ever done. And that matters, right? You want submillimeter accuracy precision in the way these surgical tools go.

We've taken advantage and invented some imaging technology so that surgeons can see in beautiful stereo vision, that's extremely natural. 3D inside the body in real time with great resolution, really good color depth, and very comfortable to look at for the surgeon. So wonderful imaging. We have returned to the surgeon the sense of touch in the use of surgery. In open surgery, you can feel things with your fingers. In laparoscopy, you can feel some things with your hands, but you're going through a little tube in the body wall called a cannula, so you get weird forces. It's not really easy.

In robotic surgery, the forces are diminished even further, and we brought this back. We put tiny force sensors at the very tip of instruments inside the body. An extremely difficult technology to do, but that has returned the sense of touch back into the hands of the surgeon during surgery. That is spectacular. The second thing about that that's been really interesting, is in addition to providing touch, it measures forces carefully. For the first time in the history of surgery, we can measure forces across a very large range of patients and surgeons, at scale, at a huge scale. There's a principle called Halsted principles that was developed here in Hopkins in the 1800s.

Eric Veiel

My, my wife actually worked in Halsted at Hopkins, so I know the building.

Gary Guthart

Fantastic. Okay. So, Halsted, the Halsted, opined a set of principles of which gentle tissue interaction and the appropriate force on tissue, is really important. This is the first time that that anybody had a very large scale, can actually see what are the forces of surgery and how do those correlate to clinical outcomes. So, I think this is a revolutionary opportunity. So that's in DaVinci five. Great workflow. Modern technologies for user design. Think of this as a modern cockpit of a car. You want to get all those screens right. You want to make it really easy. So we've been able to do that. And then the next level of surgeon comfort ergonomics and staff ergonomics.

Eric Veiel

So the car analogy is an interesting one. If I, if I think about what you all are doing, is it is it too crude to say that the early versions of what you did would have been a little bit like cruise control, and now we've, you know, progressed to the point where, you know, you go to a spot where cars can help you back into a, to your, your spot. And now we're at a point where you go to San Francisco and you can get in a car with no driver, and it's driving itself. Maybe we're not there yet, but is that a simple analogy that takes us a little bit down the journey?

Gary Guthart

You know, I think the analogy, like all ones is, is good. It's instructive and not perfect. So, you know, I'm glad you raised I think that's really cool and something we should talk about. Earliest versions were digital from the get-go. So, we had access to data and the ability to interact digitally with the customer from year 2000. But it's, at each succession of, generational update, we've been able to add computational resources. There was more compute power, better software. So where are we now in DaVinci five? Even relative to, DaVinci four, DaVinci XI, computing capability is increased four orders of magnitude. That's 10,000 times more computational power. And that’s powered by  partner of ours, NVIDIA. So now we're moving the direction that we just talked about where you said, hey, think about self-driving cars. Step one - good sensors - blind spot monitoring cameras in the front and the back, radar, adaptive cruise control. We're already there. Then step two is automated driving in some environments where it's shared control with the driver. So, you might do lane keeping on the highway. And many of our listeners to this podcast will have cars that do that. Retro adaptive cruise control and can keep it in lane. Then you go, what's the next thing after that? Well, how about some navigation in city streets? That's the next layer up. And then of course there are people like Waymo who are saying, hey, I have great sensing, a big computational architecture. I'm at the point where there's no driver at all. We are many, many years from no surgeon drivers, in the kinds of surgical procedures that Intuitive supports. Are we to a place where surgeons should fear for their jobs. No. This is going to be shared control and stepwise approach for many, many years.

Eric Veiel

It's really interesting because you know, as investors we are always looking for businesses that have true network effects. They're so powerful, right? Apple being the classic example, you get their phone, you use it, you provide data, then they can make it better. So then you want to use it more. It sounds like you all have really built, an impressive network effect business here. As surgeons use this tool, you gather data, you can assess the outcomes based upon how much pressure they apply here. Then you feed that back. So then they want to use it even more. As you think about that power of, of the data that you have, how far in that journey do you think you are?

Gary Guthart

Yeah. If we were in a baseball game, you know, we're in the third inning. I, I think that there's some things that are really interesting. We think of it as what's the problem our customer's trying to solve? Our customers don't think robots. I love robots. That's not their first thought. And it shouldn't be. Robots are just a tool. And they're not data analysts that, that isn't something that they jump up and down about either. So what's our job? They look out and say, how do I provide great outcomes for a patient population? High, highly satisfying, and easy to use working environment for my physician group, and total cost of treatment that's manageable, so that the total cost of ownership allows this to be profitable for hospitals. If it's not profitable they can't do it.

So to do that, to deliver all of that, you need an ecosystem of services and technologies that all work together seamlessly. So what are the elements of the ecosystem? Some is physical product - the robot, the instruments and accessories, the little, attachments that go per case, the imaging system. That's the stuff that's visible.

Then there's a bunch of services you need to help people get trained. Really high quality training is important. You want to make sure you're training the staff around the robot and how to clean, clean and sterilize the instrumentation. So there's that level of service and support. And then there's data analytics and decision support. That's what's going on in the ecosystem.

What's a great program. Where's a customer happy. The customer is happy when they get the outcomes they expect across the population of patients they have, across the population of surgeons and care teams that they have. And the economics flow, right. It takes an ecosystem to do that. All of those elements. If we do that well, then they'll invite us to do more with them. That is the network effect you're talking about.

Eric Veiel

So as you've evolved this business model, it's apparent that the, the percentage of revenue that you've gotten from the traditional sort of sale of the machine to all these other services has changed, and it's become a less cyclical business now, to some extent for you, less and more service generated. There's always some transition that goes on with that. And I was actually looking back through, the notes of our, of our analyst to who you got to me with earlier today, who's been with the firm for a really long time. I think you might find this interesting. He said back in April of 2014. So. I'm guessing this is when you went from XI or were launching that version “I surgeon transition has been and continues to be incredibly turbulent. However, recent diligence on its new robot launch supports my expectation that will be a highly successful growth expansion phase that will drive material positive infections and organic revenue, EPS and free cash flow growth.” So as he's thinking about that from the investment perspective, I'm sure you are living this day to day as a leader. Share with us you know how you kind of got through some of that harder transition period when you had some, business turbulence like that?

Gary Guthart

So the first thing is, you've got to look at all the economic players in the space. What's interesting is in a well-run program, the cost of the robot is actually the lowest of the three elements over time. So people look at that. Sometimes they get sticker shock, oh, these are robots are expensive. It's actually the lowest total economic cost of all the things we do at Intuitive, and all the things the customer will do with us. So we help them manage that, however they might manage it. And at the end we look at something we call quantify the impact. We help them analyze the fiscal performance of their systems. We don't do that by, just sharing our data. We help them with their data. We share our data. We are very open about how those algorithms go. And I think we built really immense credibility by being able to say, here's how you look at the total financial performance of everything you do.

So that looks great. Every time you bring in a new system or a new technology, there's a period of evaluation, sometimes waiting, sometimes measured adoption, and that can put a wave through our business. And those waves are what you're talking about here in the analyst discussion is how does that wave go? And what I'd say is the amplitude of the waves can be hard to predict sometimes, but the shape of the wave is very predictable. And so we try to do that. We try to condition our customer. Here's what's coming. We try to condition, our shareholder base, here's what the wave is coming, and then we'll pass our way through it.

Eric Veiel

Very good. As we, sit here today and you think about the next iteration of the business. And I'm sure the people at your firm are really proud of the work that you've done. But innovating is hard. And when you've got a position, a leadership position, sometimes that's the hardest spot to be in. How do you keep the team, you know, striving for the next generation of product and not getting complacent about what you've just done?

Gary Guthart

You know, the mission of the company is to look out at, professional environments, meaning hospitals and health care systems, look for where those environments are trying to seek a cure to a disease, and provide a technology enabled ecosystem. Our products and services that allow them to hit a solution to get it.

When you start there at disease state. So start with the disease state. We don't start with what are other companies doing? We respect them. We're aware of what they do. That is not our starting point. It is not our measure. Our measure is how good is the treatment pathway. I just give you a couple of examples. Lung cancer -second highest diagnostic cancer in the United States. Number one, cancer killer. Highly linked to the stage of cancer when you find it. In other words, if you find it, late five-year survival is extremely low, and the treatment pathway is brutal. If you find it early, the likelihood for long term survival is better. And the patient's journey through that is also better.

Right now. Today, the average time to find a detectable cancer, you can find it, between the time you could find it and the time you do find it is one year. In the in the number one cancer killer in the United States. I'm offended by that.

So. And you go through and say, what can we do about it? Well, it turns out that the traditional techniques to find that cancer in the lung, to go looking for it, bring with it some side effects. It was this thing called a TTNA (trans thoracic needle aspiration), which is you go under a CT scan, you put a needle from the outside of the body inside the lung, and you can puncture the lung and create a complication of bleeding and thorax. So people are rightly hesitant to apply that too quickly.

What that means is that people see a spot on the lung and they wait, and they go, come back in three months, and come back in three months, and come back in three months. And I know this because my mother went through it. She was that. She's still with us. She was 78-year olds at the time. It took 15 months before they decided to intervene. They couldn't reach the suspicious lesion in her lung, so they had to cut her open to get it out. She was six days in the ICU. It was really hard. And then she recovered.

This is crazy. And you look at that. We have a product called “ion”. And what ion does, it's a flexible robotic catheter. It's one meter long. It's fully instrumented along its leg length, and it goes through your mouth and navigates your lung with a little Google Maps of your lung or, or a mapping system. A personalized map of your lungs, and with high precision, allows the interventional pulmonologist to get a little sample of that tissue. And the risk of pneumothorax or bleeding is a fraction of the outside risk.

So you're willing to do it more quickly. And it's safer for the patient. And so you can stage shift forward the detection of lung cancer. That's what we're about. That motivates us. So, do I think we're done? I don't think we're close to done. That's one example. There are 30, of these examples where you go, I cannot believe this is the standard of care. It is outrageous. And it's nobody's fault. It's just extremely difficult. That's what drives us. That's the conversation we have. And we feel like if we stay on pace there, there are patients who need our help. There are care teams waiting for us. We're going to be fine relative to other companies who want to intervene in this space.

Eric Veiel

Yeah, that's an amazing way to think about the addressable market. If you think about just not just how big health care is, but all of the different complicated procedures and how many of them are still, you know, using methodologies that almost sounds barbaric in some ways.

Gary Guthart

If you walk behind the pit, all of us are patients in our own lives. And if we're not personally, then somebody in our family is. And which, if you go through, think of yourself as being a little bird with an accountant's cap on - one of those little green eye shades. Follow the patient journey and take notes. You go, this is unbelievable how much activity there is, how many appointments there are, how much uncertainty there is, how many tests you have to do. So, the, the opportunity for companies like ours in this space is decades.

Eric Veiel

Yeah, amazing. You know, you mentioned your mother. I wanted to spend a little bit about your, your leadership journey. And, you know, your mom, I believe, was a science teacher. Your dad was a, who was an electrical engineer at Stanford. So it's not surprising you ended up in a in a technical, scientific field. But I read something about your first job, which was at NASA, which seemed like a pretty interesting story because you were quite young. Can you share that with everybody?

Gary Guthart

Yeah, sure. I, I just had enormous luck, to have the personality type I had in the family I was born in, in the part of the world and the timing that I was born. So, I was born in Silicon Valley in 1965. My, the, the magazines on the coffee table in my parents house was the physics of fluid journals. That's what was there was that's like that's category that was just lying around the house. So, I was quiet and bookish kid. I had a talent for math, and I loved it. And I was in a, in my high school, was in a public high school, and, the calculus teacher took an interest in me, and he, he said, hey, you ought to join the math club. Let's see how you do. So I joined the math club, and I was in these math exams, and I enjoyed that. And he said, hey, I have a friend out at, we have a NASA base nearby our town, and, it's it's big on the space shuttle. So they would train at a human factors lab. They didn't call it human factors at the time. They call it man machine interfaces at the time. But Human Factors Lab, and it was run by a friend of, my calculus teacher. Just serendipity. Her name was Sandra Hart, director of that lab. And he said, why don't you go over and talk to Sandra? I had no idea.

Eric Veiel

And you're you're what, 16, 17 years old?

Gary Guthart

Must have been 17 years old. Okay. And we were lucky, right? We're in the heart of Silicon Valley. And and so this is now at high school level. So this is in the 70s and 80s. And I'm learning how to program computers in high school in the 70s and 80s. Kind of awesome. And, so I ride my bike across it. And my parents both work there. People of humble means there's nobody driving around. There's no carpools. I ride my bike down the street, across the thing, onto the NASA base. In day one, I see, these shuttle pilots flying in in the private jets and then going into flight simulators for shuttle. And I get introduced to this lab, and I had worked since I was in seventh grade. I had always held a job to have spending money, and they offered me an internship, and I couldn't say yes fast enough. This is the coolest thing and I'm going to be a scientist. This is incredible. So I worked there through, the end of high school and into college, and it was just an incredible training ground, unbelievably dedicated people, really unbelievable technology.

I saw my first 3D VR headset at NASA in the 80s. You know, Oculus, the things you talk about. Now, that stuff was there. My first, speech synthesis computers and the very beginnings of speech recognition I saw at that experience. So really early exposure to great technologies and great technologists, and wonderful technology leaders. I just, I pinch myself how lucky I am.

Eric Veiel

The image of you riding your bike onto the NASA building. Some guards must have given you a double take, right? Did they did they just wave you through and thinking, what's this kid doing here?

Gary Guthart

You know, all good. They looked at the the, you know, it was not stressful at all. They it was all I'm appreciative of that.

Eric Veiel

Maybe there's a little more security there now.  

Gary Guthart

Was a little different time.

Eric Veiel

I would hope. Well, tell us a little bit about your, your, journey as a leader. So you start out - your employee number 11. You're an engineer on the first engineering team, individual contributor doing great work I'm sure, and now you're leading over 15,000 people. You know, the lessons that you've learned along the way in transitioning from being an individual contributor to a leader, I think, can be fascinating for, for our audience to hear about.

Gary Guthart

Yeah, just some things I, I've always benefited from having a, a growth mindset or chot. Sometimes I talk about it as a child's mind, high curiosity. So the very first thing is I did not have ambition for title or money. I didn't. Early, if you'd ever ask me in this whole journey, did I expect to be a CEO, I would have said it's not in my expectations that. Early on my, my thoughts were - this is interesting. I want to go pursue this thing that I think is interesting.

Every single time I got a job, I would ask my new boss, tell me what excellence means to you, and not competence. Competence is the minimum bar. Tell me what's spectacular is what is. I want to be spectacular, not competent. And then I would ask them questions and write it down, and then I say, not just what you want me to deliver, which is the easy part. How do you want me behave? What time should I show up. What should I wear to work? How often do you want me to work late? I just want to know what your expectation are? That was spectacular. And I've done it every single time, so that was helpful.

The other thing is, I think I wanted to be around really smart people. I, I was at, Cal Berkeley, super smart people. I went down to Cal Tech for my advanced degree. Crazy smart people there. And so I've never felt like the need to be the smartest in the room. I didn't feel that I was the smartest in the room, but I really like being in a room with smart people. So that idea of what? Who do I want to be with, who's around the table? And I want to be in a team that is collectively crazy smart, and really effective.

I learned later it's not enough to be smart. They also have to be high courage. High ethics are super important, so the the priority set for me became, do I trust the people here? Are the ethics high? The second thing is their competence, not their personality. I can get along with just about anybody, but are they highly competent? And then finally I learned through going through good programs and bad programs, the economic flow has to work. So does the economics of funding, plus payment, plus margin. Does all of that work? And if it does, then you get to reinvest in the business and grow. So those are the three elements that have been really important. And I'll kick it back to you. We talk about leadership transitions. But kind of the key elements there that I took with me.

Eric Veiel

Yeah. So as you made that transition, do you still find ways to get hands on and, you know, put your put your fingers into the Da Vinci Five, and not on a person, obviously. But you know, to try it out. You do you miss that part of the job. If you don't get to.

Gary Guthart

You know, I, I think first I sort of defined as you go from, a leader of a, a subject matter, they're the thing that's highly valued is, you know, you have to come up and be often right. Nobody's always right. It's good to be often right. And then when you miss, learn quickly, demonstrate that you're learning quickly. So as a subject matter expert, you want to be at the flame front. You want to be right at the edge of what people can do. And you want to learn quickly when you miss, and you want to own your misses. So that's what that, those are the basics there.

As you start moving into leadership positions, you start realizing it's actually not my job to know all that stuff. It's other people's job. What's the job of a leader? And I think it has three elements in it. One is, a leader should lead to a future that is better for the organization. What is that better future, should help the team figure that out. They need to know how the work gets done. You can't lead what you don't understand. It's. It's hard to be a chef if you don't know how to cook. So you got to know what cooking looks like. The final point is you need to understand people. You need to appreciate them, and you need to cultivate a culture of excellence and cohesion in your team. So then you start moving into that kind of leadership structure to to drive that.

So a CEO is just that at the next layer. Do you do you understand how to deliver value for all the shareholders and constituents, the the stakeholders? This is the whole thing. Do you understand the customer need, the employee need, the shareholder need, the community need. So you need to understand that; you have a strategy to succeed in that.

The next layer is, do you have a group of people that are capable of doing that and driving that? The third thing is, does the money flow adequately to keep this all supported in a healthy way? I love putting my hands on the technology. I love the technologists even more. So, do I miss it? I don't, because I get plenty of opportunity to work with them. Do I miss writing code? I do not.

Eric Veiel

We have a lot of folks in the investment business who get into leadership and then have to look back and say, boy, I really, I miss managing that portfolio every day. People are people are harder to to manage than stocks. And that's one of the lessons I think a lot of leaders have to learn over time.

Gary Guthart

There's rebalancing there for sure.

Eric Veiel

We all make mistakes in our in our careers along the way. Are there one or two that you've made and you know, you you referenced - learn from them? What what did you take away tangibly from?

Gary Guthart

Yeah, that's absolutely true. I have made, more mistakes than I can count. The biggest ones, the most significant ones are. Some of them are straightforward, and they're learning opportunities. Right. You go. Hey, I tried this. I missed, what did I learn, what would I do differently? Let's try it again. Iterate. Sometimes speed of iteration is the most important thing.

So for me, the quick ones technology misses decisions around what should we acquire, not acquire. These happen, but they're not a long-term hard ones. The biggest hard ones are always, the decisions you make about people in organization. So, when you when you miss, when you, when you overlook something that's struggling, especially in a struggling leader, often you come late to fix it. Some, some people can be fast triggers I’m dealing with, people problems that can generate fear. And if you're a slow trigger, then you can create organizational disease. That's one of the most nuanced thing about being a leader is to understand the right time to make a change, if somebody is struggling. If you're late, you have to often deal with more than the person, but some of the organizational design issues that have fallen underneath. And if, if you're overly aggressive, then people are afraid that they can't make mistakes, and you don't want that either.

Eric Veiel

It's interesting. We, had a similar chat with with Larry Culp, CEO of GE aerospace, and he said something very similar. It's the, it's the people issues, the people mistakes, that are the hardest ones and the ones that are the most nuanced to, to deal with and that kind of stick with you the longest.

Gary Guthart

I'm in good company. He's a great leader.

Eric Veiel

He definitely is. It's amazing. What your company does, it's, it's not only been so successful for, you know, you and for the employees and us as shareholders, but clearly for society at large. And it's just it's such a great story when you've got all of those things converging, converging together. These are incredibly stressful jobs, though. Yours in particular. What do you do to relax, Gary? What is it? Go back and find some more of those fluid mechanics magazines and put your feet up.

Gary Guthart

I don't, I, so I, I have a wonderful family and community life. So, I deeply appreciate those folks. They do not care what I do for as a day job. I mean, they care theoretically, but on a day-to-day basis that that is not, what they value in me, which is great. And so spending time with them, they like to travel and I like to say yes to go on that travel. We live in a part of the country where we can be outdoors almost all the time. So, outdoor activities have been fantastic, and, I'm not a hyper overscheduled person, so I think keeping those things, in rough order in your in, at least in my life, has, has allowed me to, to lead a good life and not feel like I'm totally one sided.

Eric Veiel

What's, what's your go to travel destination? Do you have a secret place that you really love?

Gary Guthart

So my, my wife and I are on totally opposite ends of the scale. She likes to go to the to the, oldest parts of the world and look at old civilization. I love to look at how people live today, what the modern is. And so we've learned how to to, we run our travel like a braided, a braided weave, where we go to old parts and we go to new parts, and and try to enjoy each of all of it.

Eric Veiel

It sounds fantastic. That's great. Well, listen, Gary, we really appreciate you being here. It's has been a lot of fun and, super enlightening. Your, your company is amazing and you've done an incredible job with it.

Gary Guthart

Well, we've appreciated the, support of, your investment team, and and it's, it's an honor to be with you today and to be with your team today. Thank you.

Eric Veiel

Thanks so much.

Again. I'm Eric Veiel. Thank you for listening to The Angle. We look forward to your company on future episodes. You can find more information about this and other topics on our website. Please rate and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. The Angle. Better questions, better insights. Only from T Rowe Price.

Disclaimer (at the end of podcast)

This podcast episode was recorded in March 2025 and is for general information and educational purposes only.  Outside the United States, it is for investment professional use only.  It is not intended to be used by persons in jurisdictions which prohibit or restrict distribution of the material herein. 

The podcast does not give advice or recommendations of any nature; or constitute an offer or solicitation to sell or buy any security in any jurisdiction. Prospective investors should seek independent legal, financial, and tax advice before making any investment decision. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future performance.  All investments are subject to risk, including the possible loss of principal.

Discussions relating to specific securities are informational only, are not recommendations, and may or may not have been held in any T. Rowe Price portfolio. There should be no assumption that the securities were or will be profitable. T. Rowe Price is not affiliated with any company discussed. Some T. Rowe Price portfolios are invested in Intuitive Surgical.

The views contained are those of the speakers as of the date of the recording and are subject to change without notice. These views may differ from those of other T. Rowe Price associates and/or affiliates. Information is from sources deemed reliable but not guaranteed.

This podcast is copyright by T. Rowe Price, 2025.

ID0007952

202503-4289848