Transforming Healthcare: Epocrates CEO Kirk Loevner (Part 2)

SM: Where did you go after Apple?

KL: I went to Silicon Graphics in 1993. They recruited me away because they wanted to build a developer organization like the one Apple had. That was a tough story. They were inwardly focused. They were the first to come up with a high performance graphics computer and tried to ride that; they did not do much beyond it.

Windows NT with Autodesk and other programs started eating into the low end of the market. Then high-end digital video editing software products became available, and all of a sudden Silicon Graphics’s market was under attack. They bought Cray to move upstream. That was like a boat anchor, and culturally the companies were very different.

I left Silicon Graphics in 1996 and have since done four startup companies. I only started one of the four. The first startup was Internet Shopping Network, which was the first retailer on the Internet. Randy Adams had started it in late 1994, and I took over as CEO in late 1996. E-commerce was just starting.

At the time people, questioned why I would leave a position as a senior vice president of a Fortune 500 company to run a little company that did shopping over the Internet. Within a year and a half the whole thing was moving in that direction. The company was bought by Home Shopping Network.

In 1998 I wanted to do the next thing, so I started a little company called PublishOne. I was one of the few people who had Internet commerce experience, and I realized that digital goods would soon be sold online. This was before Napster and there was not yet enough bandwidth on the Internet to sell video. I ended up going in the direction of business publishing for market research companies.

SM: Was there enough appetite in the market for that yet?

KL: It was early. My company never became very big. I was bought a couple of years later by InterTrust, which was a digital rights company in Santa Clara. They were doing a lot of the underlying digital rights management software that enabled companies like mine. I had partnerships with Adobe and InterTrust to allow them to protect books which were published online.

In 2001 I took over ScreamingMedia in New York City. The original business model was to take news feeds from USA Today and CNN, apply a filter, and deliver targeted content to customer websites.

SM: Content syndication essentially?

KL: Content syndication. It was an early player, and in 2001 to 2002 it was becoming more commoditized.

SM: Content syndication today is primarily free.

KL: Right. At the time we would pay for feeds and then get paid by vendors who wanted slices for the feeds. The margins became increasingly narrow, so I transitioned the company into a financial services area where we were providing portfolio management tools for the Wall Street Journal and similar customers. We did charting and other financial news activities that their customers would see on their websites. The company lost $30 million in 2001 when I joined, and I got it profitable. We were profitable by 2004 at $40 million in revenue.

SM: That is actually sizeable revenue.

KL: For that time and content it was.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Transforming Healthcare: Epocrates CEO Kirk Loevner
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