Featured Videos

Building an Exciting Healthcare IT Company From Chicago: LaunchPoint CEO Terry Ryan (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Is there anything else from your strategic thought process that you want to share that has helped you achieve what you’ve achieved so far?

Terry Ryan: I would just like to touch for a moment on VCs, private equity, and growth capital, I’ve done all the above. When people talk to me about that kind of stuff, I say to those people, “I feel I’ve successfully worked with those markets.” I don’t have the story where someone came in and took over my company because something went sideways. They came and helped. Three years later, we exited and everyone was happy and I still have Christmas dinner with them every once in a while. When you’re dealing with those groups, you have to realize that maybe all of them won’t tell you that what you have isn’t good or that you’re positioned wrong. They’ll try to convince you that you’re always at the right stage for them. There’s a bunch of things that you need to do as an entrepreneur to size up the companies that you decide to >>>

Aiming to Dominate Real Estate Brokerage: Robert Reffkin, CEO of Urban Compass (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You said you raised a lot of money. What’s the total amount of financing you raised?

Robert Reffkin: $73 million.

Sramana Mitra: Why have you raised so much money? What have you done with that money?

Robert Reffkin: We raised $73 million because we wanted to hire the best people we possibly could.

Sramana Mitra: The large part of that $73 million is in people?

Robert Reffkin: Virtually, all of it is in people. We still have a vast majority of it.
>>>

Building an Exciting Healthcare IT Company From Chicago: LaunchPoint CEO, Terry Ryan (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You’ve been in the market for five years. You have not raised any other funding after that $10 million seed round. Where are you now?

Terry Ryan: We have definitely turned down funding. It’s a very interesting world in healthcare IT right now.

Sramana Mitra: Yes, it’s a very interesting world.

Terry Ryan: We have 34 live clients today. On average, those clients run one to six of our seven in-production applications out of a total of 15 in our product roadmap. I can build a product and a half per year organically without outside capital. We became profitable as a software company last year. We’re a self generating machine but at the same time, you have constraints when you’re working within that same self-generation. We’re scaling the business. We were 100th on the Inc 500 list. We had 3,600% growth over the last three years.

>>>

Aiming to Dominate Real Estate Brokerage: Robert Reffkin, CEO of Urban Compass (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What else is interesting in the strategic story?

Robert Reffkin: While searching for the most valuable products and services to this business, we surveyed our clients and asked them what they cared most about. They cared most about helping them answer questions like what’s the right price for a home and how do you find a buyer. Our focus is on creating technology around the research on valuation tools to help our agents advise on prices. Then we identified a bunch of digital and non-digital exposure strategies to make sure that sellers are in front of all the right eyeballs as much as possible.

Initially, it was more around building a mobile app. As we progressed, it was becoming around saving time for agents and building valuation tools so that they can be better advisors. From a strategy perspective, I think it’s very easy when you’re young to not know exactly what >>>

Building an Exciting Healthcare IT Company From Chicago: LaunchPoint CEO Terry Ryan (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: That was what I was trying to extract. One of the things that is always very compelling is if you can solve a serious enterprise problem for people who have a lot of money and for whom you can end up saving a lot of money. That’s the reason why I took you through these questions. How long did it take you to build that product and start selling?

Terry Ryan: It took us about a year and a half to get our first product to market and sell it to the first customer.

Sramana Mitra: In that time, did you have a customer already in the process who were giving you input? >>>

Aiming to Dominate Real Estate Brokerage: Robert Reffkin, CEO of Urban Compass (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: From the time that you launched to getting to your first customers who were selling their properties on your platform, what was the time window? How long did it take you to get your first transaction?

Robert Reffkin: The first transaction was in the first month. It was a rental. We had more demands to see homes. We had to hire aggressively in order to meet the demands of all the clients who wanted to see homes.

Sramana Mitra: How did the agent ramp happen? How many agents did you start with? How did you scale that agent process? It seems like that’s one of the key scaling pieces.

Robert Reffkin: We started with just 20 agents. Now we have 100. We definitely have to grow quickly.
>>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Warren Barkley, CTO of SMART Technologies (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: That sounds terrible. The example you gave is shocking.

Warren Barkley: That was probably one of the worst examples. I’ve seen scenarios where kids aren’t allowed on the network, so they have apps downloaded for them. They can work on some applications, but then there’s no learning artifact out of it. The devices can’t just be fancy game-playing machines. You’ve to have output in the form of a digital artifact that kids can carry along and see the learning. In a lot of places, the best thing I’ve heard around this is that our classrooms are authentically reflecting the reality of the society that our kids live in >>>

Building an Exciting Healthcare IT Company From Chicago: LaunchPoint CEO Terry Ryan (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Healthcare IT has been a very active field in terms of startups and innovation in the last 10 years, maybe. What was the next level? As you double-clicked down on healthcare, what are the other sets of choices? What was the next level of process to determine where in healthcare you were going to focus?

Terry Ryan: That’s a really good question. We reminded ourselves that all the good things we’ve spent the last decade doing in the data space were all concentrated around the biggest, hairiest, and most complex types of data that you want to throw out. We were, at times, known as the consultant’s consultant. We pulled back and said, “If we’re really going to continue that experience, where in healthcare are we dealing with enormous concentrations of data? Where in healthcare are we dealing with complex data?” Once we studied that a bit, we decided to get down to the claim level. >>>