Meet the CEO making it harder to buy an Apple Watch this Christmas

He moved to Alabama with his family in 1974 so his father could study engineering, Forbes reported, before relocating to San Diego, where his father pursued his MBA.

Two years after that move, Kiani’s parents headed back to Iran for work, leaving him and his sister (aged 14 and 15) in the US. Kiani’s mother was a nurse who visited villages and remote locations where residents didn’t have access to healthcare, he said an interview with the Texas Medical Center.

Kiani tried to go the pre-med route as a chemistry major, but stopped because he wasn’t good at chemistry, he told the Texas Medical Center. Instead, he said was good at physics and decided to become an engineer.

He said he left the company at 23 because it wanted him to work on a making the pulse oximeter cheaper instead of making the existing technology more accurate, the CEO told the Texas Medical Center.

When Kiani started the company with the goal of improving pulse oxomiters, the CEO worked 7 days a week and only took two-four day weekends for seven years, he said during a 2013 commencement speech at Chapman University.

He led the development of Masimo’s Signal Extraction Technology, a pulse oximeter that the company claims can accurately measure blood oxygen levels, especially when the patient is in motion.

Masimo is now behind a slate of non-invasive patient monitoring devices that aim to improve patient safety and reduce the cost of care. Under Kiani’s leadership, Masimo’s devices were adopted by hospitals around the world.

When Kiani isn’t leading Masimo, he focuses his efforts on healthcare advocacy.

In 2010, Kiani started the Masimo Foundation for Ethics, Innovation and Competition in Healthcare with the goal of improving patient safety and making advanced healthcare accessible across the world, according to Masimo.

A year after that, he created the Masimo Political Action Committee to influence healthcare policy, according to his AAE Speakers bio.

Then in 2013, he started the Patient Safety Movement Foundation & Coalition, which aims to reduce over 200,000 preventable patient deaths in US hospitals every year.

PCAST is responsible for advising the President with knowledge in science and technology to inform public policy, according to the White House.

The package includes more than $9.8 million in stock awards, according to an SEC filing.

The CEO’s net worth was $1.3 billion as of April of this year, according to Forbes.

In 1999, Kiani sued Nellcor, a pulse oximetry manufacturer, for using its technology without his company’s permission. In 2006, Masimo reached a settlement with Nellcor that totaled nearly $800 million in damages and royalties, Forbes reported.

In 2009, Masimo launched a similar lawsuit against Philips Electronics, a Dutch healthcare equipment company. Seven years later, Philips agreed to pay Masimo $300 million as part of their settlement agreement, according to the SEC.

Kiani said that in 2013, Apple poached 25 of the medical technology company’s engineers, including its chief medical officer and the CTO of a spinoff company, he told Bloomberg.

“They didn’t have to steal our people. We could’ve worked with them,” he told Bloomberg. “They could’ve been an example of how to do things right and do things well.”

Still, “There needs to be an apology” from Apple, Kiani told Bloomberg.