SM: You did two companies prior to Epocrates which were focused on content? KL: PublishOne and ScreamingMedia were content-oriented. SM: After ScreamingMedia you were recruited to Epocrates? KL: I sold ScreamingMedia to CBS in 2004.
SM: Where did you go after Apple? KL: I went to Silicon Graphics in 1993. They recruited me away because they wanted to build a developer organization like the one Apple had. That was a tough story.
Kirk Loevner began his career with VisiCorp in the early 1980s before moving to Apple, where he worked for the next ten years. Afterwards he worked at Silicon Graphics, as the CEO of Internet Shopping Network, and then founded PublishOne in November 1998. He then was the CEO and chairman of Pinnacor (ScreamingMedia) from December
SM: What should I have aksed you that I didn’t? Where do you go from here? RJ: We spend the next couple of years getting up to the level of revenue, assuming we perform to our projections, that will allow us to go public. Hopefully the IPO market will be back.
SM: I do like that you initially started out as a bootstrapped company. Do you think that helped you focus in the beginning? RJ: One reason I am happy that we waited for three years prior to being funded, aside from figuring things out without the potentially unwanted help from VCs, is that we had
SM: If you are doing an OpenSource application server I have no problem gauging the size of that market. RJ: Obviously there was already one significant player in that space, JBoss. JBoss was really largely a commodity play similar to MySQL. We have previously brought genuine, new ideas to market, and that is what we
SM: When you put your framework out there in the OpenSource domain you did it as an individual, correct? What went through your mind as you saw the adoption? RJ: I have always had a somewhat hardnosed attitude about it. When I was writing the book, I was doing it to help build my personal
SM: What kind of work did you do in your early IT career? RJ: I started off as a regular developer and rapidly moved into senior architect roles. I worked for a variety of companies in the London area, including the Pearson Group, who own the Financial Times.