Sramana: Your goal is to become a billion-dollar company. It sounds like one of your primary strategies for reaching that goal is the introduction of new products. Omar Hussain: Absolutely. There are a lot of problem areas in healthcare right now. Things like secure printing, secure electronic information exchange, electronic prescription authentication, and patient identification
Sramana: Did you take a major hit in 2008 that drove this decision? Omar Hussain: We slowed down on growth. In 2008 we ended at $18 million, and in 2009 we only grew 10% to $20 million. The market had shifted slightly. We did not raise money because we already had capital. Once we decided
Sramana: Who was your competition? Omar Hussain: We had a lot of other software-only competitors that were directory centric. We were the only solution that was packaged as an appliance that did not require a directory service, so from that perspective we had no direct competitors. We had an application profile generator which was a
Sramana: What steps did you take in terms of process to achieve that rocket in sales? Omar Hussain: Philosophically, I have always believed that people ask the wrong questions when they talk to customers. They always try to sell them the idea. Most human beings who are being sold something based on an idea will
Sramana: The terms for accepting the term sheet involved your joining the company. Did the founders stick around after you came on board? Omar Hussain: There were originally two co-founders. One left and the other, David, remained. He is still here today, and he is essentially my partner. We got funded and within four months
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Omar Hussain is the president and CEO of Imprivata. Before joining Imprivata, Omar was the founder and CEO of Anchorsilk, an e-commerce software company spun out of Compuware, where he was GM of its Windows Tools and Testing business. Serving in senior executive leadership roles, Omar
After this conversation with Anant, I went and talked to Radhika Ghosal, the 15-year-old from New Delhi, who took the MIT Circuits and Electronics course. Sramana: Radhika, how did you find out about edX? Radhika Ghosal: I found out about edX back when it was called MITx. I read about MITx on Hack A Day
Sramana: That is absolutely awesome. The state of engineering education in India, outside of IIT, is awful. Anant Agarwal: I really care about creating courses that have the same quality and rigor of on-campus courses. There is a misconceived notion that online courses cannot have the same quality of education. I disagree. We have proven