Daniel Hawkins

Founder and Senior Advisor, Shockwave Medical

Search every verified Daniel Hawkins interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Daniel Hawkins, founder and senior advisor at Shockwave Medical and founder of Avail Medsystems, has been active in discussions on medtech sales, leadership, and Kansas state politics. In a 2023 interview at the LSI USA '23 Emerging Medtech Summit, Hawkins discussed Avail Medsystems, a company he founded in 2017 that provides a hardware-software platform for remote surgical support. He described the platform as a "procedural telemedicine" system that allows medical device representatives and remote physicians to participate in surgeries via a console with cameras and screen, which he said reduces the need for in-person presence and addresses inefficiencies in the traditional sales model. Hawkins noted that Avail had contracts with over 50 medical device manufacturers and was placed in hundreds of locations across the United States. He also stated that the company grew from about 20 to 140 employees and raised approximately $150 million during the COVID-19 pandemic. In a separate 2023 interview on the "State of Medtech" podcast, Hawkins reflected on his career, including his role as employee number six at Intuitive Surgical and his founding of Shockwave Medical. He said he bought the intellectual property for Shockwave's lithoplasty technology after venture capitalists declined to fund it, starting the company with "a few hundred thousand dollars." Hawkins also discussed his leadership philosophy, stating that "success can breed complacency, and complacency breeds failure," and that he aims to "crowdsource knowledge and decision-making." In a 2024 campaign ad for the Kansas House of Representatives, Hawkins highlighted his legislative record, including supporting a government oversight committee, abolishing the food sales tax and the tax on social security, increasing penalties for killing a police canine, fully funding public schools, and improving Medicaid. He stated, "I ran for office to make sure Topeka is working for you not political insiders."