Long Journey in Healthcare: Canadian Entrepreneurs Matthew Sappern and Emily Hamilton of PeriGen (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The story that you described from 1995 to 2008 is not Perigen?

Emily Hamilton: Correct. Perigen acquired all of the assets of that company.

Sramana Mitra: Who’s Perigen?

Matthew Sappern: Perigen is actually the combination of a company called E&C Medical, which was based in Tel Aviv that was trying to do pretty much what Emily’s team is doing, but from a different place. It was all driven around intervening in difficult labors. E&C, in 2009, was owned by a few private equity firms who decided to invest in buying the assets of Emily’s company and combining them with the assets of E&C into one company, naming it Perigen.

Sramana Mitra: Did E&C have any customers? Was there revenue in the company?

Matthew Sappern: There was revenue, about the equivalent of what Emily’s company had. Significantly large healthcare systems were customers. >>>

Long Journey in Healthcare: Canadian Entrepreneurs Matthew Sappern and Emily Hamilton of PeriGen (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How many hospitals, for instance, were you able to sell your product to in that early phase right after getting the prototype?

Emily Hamilton: Almost all of the hospitals in Montreal. We have two medical schools here. I had colleagues in many of the hospitals who were former students or colleagues for many years. Montreal is a city of about three million and we have five or six hospitals. People were very interested in efficiency and high value healthcare delivery. It became quite evident that we needed to do more.

There’s a problem in labor, which is analyzing the baby’s heart rate because that’s what we use to estimate whether or not the baby is tolerating labor well. Many people have tried to develop fetal heart rate pattern recognition algorithms and they couldn’t. With this team, we were able to do that quite successfully. I’ll just jump ahead because I think it was the culmination of those two. The litigation settlements can be so astronomical. That began to attract the attention of US entities. >>>

Long Journey in Healthcare: Canadian Entrepreneurs Matthew Sappern and Emily Hamilton of PeriGen (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: When you talk about timing, what year are we talking about?

Emily Hamilton: Back in mid-1990s.

Sramana Mitra: So you got a bunch of grants to get this thing off the ground.

Emily Hamilton: It wasn’t exactly a grant in the traditional sense. This was money which was intended to foster research, which would have commercial potential. If, at the end of the research period, it appeared to have commercial potential, the university would help secure venture capital or financing to help to bring it to the next level.

Sramana Mitra: When you started in 1995, how much capital were you able to access in this mode?

Emily Hamilton: The first funding was about $2 million. >>>

Long Journey in Healthcare: Canadian Entrepreneurs Matthew Sappern and Emily Hamilton of PeriGen (Part 1)

Perigen is an amalgamation of a couple of different companies. This story relates how the entrepreneurs navigated a long journey.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by telling us a little bit about your personal background. I’d like to do that with both of you since you are co-founders.

Matthew Sappern: Just for clarity’s sake, Emily developed this technology. I was brought in by the Board a number of years ago to essentially restart this company.

Sramana Mitra: I see. Emily is the founder.

Matthew Sappern: One of the initial founders, and the developer of the core technology. >>>

Bootstrapping to $100 Million: Edifecs CEO Sunny Singh (Part 7)

Sunny Singh: Edifecs has become a business applications company providing business applications for these transformative things happening in healthcare. We have a lot of runway both in the US and international in servicing healthcare. From $100 million, our expectation is to become a $200 million company by 2017.

Going back to the point where I turned 50 last year, I said, “What do I want to do for my next 25 years even though I want to live more than that?” I want to do a couple of things. One is social enterprise. I created a social enterprise called Sabtera. The idea of Sabtera is to work in a local area in India in the state of Punjab where I live. Working with underprivileged kids and giving them a seven-day week nursing environment based on progressive education. >>>

Bootstrapping to $100 Million: Edifecs CEO Sunny Singh (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: When you look at the journey, first and foremost, it’s fascinating and congratulations for staying with it. I would say the main determining factor between success and failure is staying power. You described two points where you stood there looking in the mirror. That was a very critical point where if you chose to go work for Microsoft and took the easy way out, today would have been a very different day. You did stay with it and you did keep the team.

My takeaway from your story as well as from a lot of stories I’ve heard is staying power and the commitment to stay is one of the determining factors of success in a lot of entrepreneurs’ journeys.

Sunny Singh: I don’t think I’m any smarter than the next guy. Actually, I’m not. The fact is it’s about the choices you make. I’ve friends who made choices and they are where they are today. I made my choices and I am where I am today. That’s what I tell my kids but not formally so. I want them to decide what they want to do. I don’t want to tell my kids what they should be. I don’t want to tell my colleagues what they should >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: Evariant CEO Bill Moschella (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: In terms of your own customer acquisition, is it all direct selling? Do you have a field sales force?

Bill Moschella: Yes, we have field sales and partner channel as well. We have an awesome partner channel team who are from Cloudera, Microsoft, and Oracle. They are now on-board and doing an amazing job.

Sramana Mitra: In terms of your organization, are you still headquartered in Connecticut?

Bill Moschella: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: How big is the company in terms of team?

Bill Moschella: At this point, we’re probably around 200 people all over the country. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: Evariant CEO Bill Moschella (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s say you do that segmentation and figure out where the gap is. Do you also handle stuff like Google PPC campaigns for them?

Bill Moschella: Yes. They can either use their own agency, do it internally, or use our media-as-a-service where they pay a subscription cost to the media and then we give them the projected lead generation. If you put this money, the Evariant engine will give you more predictable results because we’re using analytics from past campaigns and current campaigns. By the way, we already have the templates ready in our engine, so just pick the campaign, select the target market you want to go after, and we’ll start pointing them towards call centre web forms, mobile, etc.

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting, actually. What does a typical deal size look like for you when you’re working with a hospital? Is it a $100,000 recurring revenue in an annual account or is this a million dollar recurring account? >>>