PBX as SaaS: RingCentral CEO Vlad Shmunis (Part 4)

SM: What was the application that you were developing at the time? VS: It was an answering machine on the PC. We developed the application, and it would not work. We had a meeting with HP up in Boston, and we were getting worried. My chief engineer and I had a sleepless night and found

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PBX as SaaS: RingCentral CEO Vlad Shmunis (Part 3)

SM: Did you build your business yourself, or did you take outside funding? VS: We were not funded. We were always self-sustained. Eventually we figured out that we could reuse code we had, which let us focus on specific types of projects.

PBX as SaaS: RingCentral CEO Vlad Shmunis (Part 2)

SM: Tell me about your first job at Corporate Data Science. VS: It was in the very early days before Windows and before DOS, back in 1981. I was a Unix systems engineer. They were trying to come up with an Operating System.

PBX as SaaS: RingCentral CEO Vlad Shmunis (Part 1)

Vlad is the CEO and founder of RingCentral, which provides VoIP, hosted PBX, voicemail, fax and Internet call waiting services through platforms such as RingCentral.com, Pagoo.com and Buzme.com. Prior to RingCentral he was the founder and CEO of Ring Zero, a provider of desktop voice and fax communication software for the OEM market. He graduated

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Transforming Healthcare: Epocrates CEO Kirk Loevner (Part 7)

SM: Candidly, are there other companies who are executing as well with a strong adoption curve? KL: WebMD has done very well. A big part of their business is consumer, and their growth rate has slowed dramatically.

Transforming Healthcare: Epocrates CEO Kirk Loevner (Part 6)

SM: Let’s talk about TAM. You looked at $400 million TAM on the physician side and $14 billion TAM on the pharma advertising side. Now we are looking at $250 billion TAM on the health care administration side. Those are serious orders of magnitude. KL: I think right now we are taking smaller steps. The

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Transforming Healthcare: Epocrates CEO Kirk Loevner (Part 5)

SM: Is there anything in the software-as-a-service world that you are observing or that you could tie up with? KL: Traditionally all of those IT systems have been client-server types of relationships. All of the newer point solutions emerging are using the software-as-a-service model.

Transforming Healthcare: Epocrates CEO Kirk Loevner (Part 4)

SM: You came into the company in 2004. What were the first few things you did? KL: I didn’t have to change the company in a radical way. I looked at the market opportunity for how much physicians and health care professionals would spend for software and reference materials. That is a $400 million market.