Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Tom Hogan, CEO of Kony (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: That is actually a segue into the kinds of opportunities out there that are open problems. It’s one thing for corporations to try to innovate and come up with new ideas and processes using all these technologies. It’s also that same activity and ideation process that is going on the entrepreneur side. I think people are thinking about how to take advantage of those kinds of capabilities as it pertains to enterprise mobility. Have you seen anything really compelling in that field?

Tom Hogan: There are ideas and approaches that we see everyday that you scratch your head and say, “I would have never thought of that.” In terms of big productized offerings versus use case ideas, I think it’s still early innings. In terms of opportunities at the entrepreneur level, I would think the best opportunities would come from use case ideas. The abused example is Uber. The reason everybody uses them is because it’s so pervasive. Who would have thought, even four years ago, that somebody was going to create a $40 billion business.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a $40 million market cap driven by very artificial valuation drivers.
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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 >>>

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.

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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? >>>

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. >>>

Building an Exciting Healthcare IT Company From Chicago: LaunchPoint CEO Terry Ryan (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: So about 2008, you were done with HP?

Terry Ryan: That’s when I started the current business I’m running. I had successful exits in the 90s with companies in which I was an early employee but I wasn’t a founder of those companies. I had some nice exits in three or four cases before I started Knightsbridge. Fast forward to 2008, I sat down with HP management and said, “I think if I point my guns in one direction for the next decade, I can move this battleship and make a difference. At the same time, I think I can make a bigger difference going out and building my next company.” I politely gave them all the time they wanted. I decided I was going to take six months off and think real hard about what I wanted to do next. I wanted to build on what we did in the Knightsbridge days, which was build world-class data warehouses that solved business problems. I wanted to take the next step, which was not only to do that, but also to own and build the software and solution set that provided great business value for the clients.

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Building an Exciting Healthcare IT Company From Chicago: LaunchPoint CEO Terry Ryan (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: They were very heavy. I’m a very small woman having to carry this heavy laptop. It was no fun at all. What was the first company?

Terry Ryan: It was called Knightsbridge. It was a company that was focused on Big Data architectures. This was in the early 90s before it was cool like it is today. It was focused around data warehousing, business analytics, and information management. I built a consultancy that was about 750 people with a global client base headquartered in Chicago. I did that with three partners. It had a lot to do with my background and focus. We were in most industries. We really focused on doing the most high-end data warehousing and analytics build out there in the industry.

Sramana Mitra: You built a contract software company around the data warehousing area?

Terry Ryan: We call it more of a management consulting. Our average bill rates were around $235 an hour across 750 people. It wasn’t a body shop.
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Building an Exciting Healthcare IT Company From Chicago: LaunchPoint CEO Terry Ryan (Part 1)

At the cusp of three major trends, Big Data, Cloud Computing, and Healthcare IT, Terry Ryan is building a very interesting company from Chicago. The company is profitable, already of substantial scale, and at a very exciting juncture.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journeys. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background? Give us some back story.

Terry Ryan: I was born and raised in the Midwest in the suburbs of Chicago. I spent most of my time in the Midwest, but I’ve also lived around the world including Europe. I’ve done business across most of the continents, but Chicago is home.

Sramana Mitra: What did you do for college? What’s your educational background?
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