Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: William King, CEO of Zephyr Health (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What are the other buckets of data?

William King: We take the public domain data and co-mingle it with proprietary data from our customers. This could be anything that they’re generating from things like CRM systems, ERP, or any of the data capture system that they’ve built and are leveraging internally. We can co-mingle that with public domain data.

The final category is purchase data. It’s very exciting to see how the data vendor landscape continues to evolve. Of course, there are the big behemoths that have been in the category for decades and continue to be very relevant and important. Increasingly, we >>>

Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: William King, CEO of Zephyr Health (Part 1)

I first spoke with William for our Entrepreneur Journeys series in March 2015. This is a follow-up discussion on the company’s progress and extensive impact by harnessing data from a hundred different sources to help pharmaceutical companies across various use cases. Excellent insights!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by catching up a bit. We spoke sometime back in the Entrepreneur Journeys series where you introduced Zephyr Health. Our audience has that. We’ll connect that story to this one so people can go back and read that story. Catch me up on what’s happening. >>>

Bootstrapping from Indiana: Passageways CEO Paroon Chadha (Part 7)

Paroon Chadha: There is a nuanced point that I’m trying to make here. I love Chris like a brother. He has worked with me for 10 years. I don’t think there will be another person who’ll ever be smarter than him. At the same time, what we needed at that time was not something we could have done together.

What we did after was to build a true SaaS subscription mentality. The marketing, sales, and tooling had to be done differently. In general, there’s a lot of evolution that happened. I had that to really leverage as well.

Sramana Mitra: Last question is about what you said about buying your other shareholders out. They took their money and left. Could you elaborate on that? You haven’t exited and you haven’t taken any financing except for that $100,000. What financial engineering did you do to give your co-founders exits?

>>>

Bootstrapping from Indiana: Passageways CEO Paroon Chadha (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like when you did the cloud strategy, you almost did it with a different product. Even though the technology was the same, the positioning was quite different. The board technology was for the cloud software.

Paroon Chadha: As an organization, we made the jump from being a Windows company to a web company, and from a web company to a cloud company, from a cloud company to a mobile company, then from mobile into social; there’re not a lot of companies that can do that. There’s a reason for it. People who build that technology and who come up with that strategy have a firm world view. You have to destroy your own world to get to the next level. >>>

Bootstrapping from Indiana: Passageways CEO Paroon Chadha (Part 5)

Paroon Chadha: We started to see some cross-pollination. We were pulling some leads that we didn’t really plan for. It was a little bit organic. We needed to move out of financial because the financial sector was stalling. We found ourselves selling in hospitals with some success.

Then we ran into a very interesting founder challenge. They were more personal in nature than anything else. Chris took some time off. We needed to make a move. The product that we >>>

Bootstrapping from Indiana: Passageways CEO Paroon Chadha (Part 4)

Paroon Chadha: If one has to learn a business, you’d rather start out from where your foundation is good. Raising capital and accelerating based on your balance sheet is a thing you can do anytime. If you have a solid core business, it’ll happen. The reverse of that is not possible.

If you fund your initial journey, but you don’t have a business model figured out yet, then you still don’t know whether you’re a business or not. We were profitable from year one. We never raised more money. Up until this point, I am still working completely in the bootstrapped mode. Now we are about 65 employees. Hopefully, we’ll get to 100 by the end >>>

Bootstrapping from Indiana: Passageways CEO Paroon Chadha (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: This was 150 users through that credit union customer?

Paroon Chadha: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: You had one anchor customer and you had a software that was receiving feedback from the beginning.

Paroon Chadha: Chris was writing code, and I was out selling. We didn’t fear anything at that time. I wish I could be like that again. We really went in and looked for funding and customers. Our finance professor was the Chairman of the Purdue Federal >>>

Bootstrapping from Indiana: Passageways CEO Paroon Chadha (Part 2)

Paroon Chadha: You are never going to be surrounded by so many super smart and super open people in your life. When you’re at school, there are a lot of engineers and computer scientists. There are a lot of people who are good at math. You can pretty much come up with any idea and if you try hard enough, you can find two or three people who will start meeting around that idea.

Forming a company is a real possibility. I realized that going into school and I really started to look for a good way to do this. My co-founder Christopher Beltran was an undergraduate. We were part of an e-commerce club. In 1999, Yahoo! and eBay were the two hot companies. Yahoo! was a portal company in the consumer space and eBay was an auction engine.

>>>