Top women 2026: All-star honoree Kathy Odell
She’s got the prescription for success
By Paula Aven Gladych
Special to the Business Times
Kathy Odell has reinvented herself many times over the years, since she helped found Medical Concepts Inc. in Santa Barbara in 1985. Some might even call her a serial entrepreneur.
“For me, my career has sort of been a dream sequence of companies because I’ve been fortunate enough to have the ability to always be able to find a project that does good for people and that’s dynamic and exciting to run,” said Odell, who currently serves as chief business officer-healthcare at Cadense, a company that designs adaptive footwear for people who experience walking challenges.
In 1985, she met two men who had an idea for a video camera for endoscopy.
“So, we put together a company, not expecting it to be anything big, but within five or six years, we were the largest supplier of those in the country,” she said. She and her partners sold that company in 1990 to Karl Storz, a $3 billion German company that was a leader in the field of rigid endoscopy.
Odell ran the business until 1999, when she decided to go back to being an entrepreneur. In 2001, she was the judge of a business plan competition and the three-person team that won were UCSB undergraduates who had an idea for a portable oxygen concentrator.
She liked the idea so much that she and another judge from the competition decided to help get the company off the ground. Called Inogen, the company went public in 2014. Odell ran it as CEO for five years.
“It was a fabulous company,” she said. Customers would write in all the time and tell them how the portable oxygen concentrators changed their lives, allowing them to go places they never thought they could because of COPD.
Odell was “our first real mentor,” said Ali Bauerlein, co-founder of Inogen and current COO at Sight Sciences. “She is, first of all, so much fun. She’s energetic and knows how to bring people together and have them work towards a shared purpose. She has the ability to really just bring something down to the core message and the core points and get other people just as excited as she is about the opportunity.”
Bauerlein added that “Kathy was always willing to teach, to share, to include us and make sure she was making the right decisions, not only for our company but for the founders as well.”
Before starting at Cadense, Odell served as CEO of Women’s Economic Ventures for five years before retiring in May 2024.
Many people thought that was it for her, but “I’m still working because I love what I do,” she said. In May 2025, she teamed up with the founders of Cadense to help bring their variable friction shoes to medical markets.
The company is only a couple of years old and “there is always energy and excitement about some new milestone,” she said. “We get absolutely wonderful reviews and thank you notes coming in from customers. It makes it all worthwhile.”
Her work for Cadense is in line with what she did at Medical Concepts and Inogen.
Neither CEO and Co-Founder Johannes Sauer nor Founder and Chief Technology Officer Tyler Susko had experience in medical markets. They asked Odell to figure out how to get their footwear into medical payor markets like Medicare Advantage, home equipment dealers and senior living operators.
Because of her many years working with businesses, she has lots of stories to share about her past experiences and is always willing to share some of the challenges and lessons of building a company.
Cadense grew 106% last year.
“We’re seeing more awareness in the marketplace, so it’s just going great,” she said. “We’ve got good clinical reports and customer satisfaction is very, very high, so we are just looking forward to how we continue to grow the company and serve more people.”
One out of four seniors falls at least once a year, she said, and falls by seniors cost the U.S. healthcare system over $80 billion annually.
“Anything we can do to keep them from falling, that’s what our shoe does. It helps prevent trips and falls,” she added.
Family is very important to her. She was a single mom before marrying her husband in 1993, and he came into the relationship with three sons from a previous marriage.
“I love to cook and I’m always entertaining, whether it’s for family or friends,” she said.
People have pointed out to her that she is getting older and has retired twice already. They ask her if she is ever going to mean it.
Her response: “No, I flunked retirement because to me it’s so exciting, even through the challenges, exciting to work on those challenges, to be every day in conversation with people trying to do something important.”
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