Sramana: Let’s talk about your current company, Modernizing Medicine. What were the circumstances of the founding of Modern medicine? What was the genesis? Daniel Cane: Modernizing Medicine is one of those companies where two people met under the right circumstances; in this case a serial tech entrepreneur meets a visionary doctor. Both of us were
Sramana: In our incubation program, we teach people to get customer validation as soon as possible. It must be done before you even think about investors. Daniel Cane: It is wonderful that you have formalized that concept into a methodology that can be taught. You can only achieve scale through formalized process. When I talk
Sramana: Let’s touch on a few highlights of the Blackboard story. You started building pages for professors, and then other universities started contacting you. Did you finish college or did you drop out to do this? Daniel Cane: I didn’t drop out; I finished by the skin of my teeth! I graduated from Cornell with
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Daniel is president and CEO of south Florida–based Modernizing Medicine, Inc., a healthcare company that aims to change the way medical information is created, consumed, and used to increase efficiency, lower costs, and improve outcomes. Daniel has a BS from Cornell University where, as an undergraduate,
Sramana: How long did it take for people to start engaging you once you had decided to sell the company? Eli Sasson: It is hard to say because we did not start the process at a particular date and time. We gradually moved into the decision and gradually made it known. I would say that
Sramana: How did you manage your rapid growth from $5 million to $25 million? Eli Sasson: We had to expand the management layer of the company. That was the key first step. We added additional information systems to enhance reporting. We had to really build out all aspects of the company.
Sramana: When did you make the pivot into the KVM market? Eli Sasson: We did that in the mid-1990s. From 1995 on, we were active in both the educational market and the KVM [keyboard, video and mouse] market. The KVM market ultimately emerged as the primary market. By the time we took on funding, our
Sramana: How did you bridge the product gap? You had built a product for PCs, and then many of your potential customers ended up using PS/2. How did you bridge the gap? Eli Sasson: Byte magazine covered the older product, but that was also at a point where we were also almost ready to release