Building a Healthcare IT Company to $100 Million: Dr. Rob Langdon, Co-Founder of T-System (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What scale is the company at now?

Rob Langdon: It’s approaching nine figures.

Sramana Mitra: Sounds like it’s becoming an enterprise software and healthcare IT company at this point. Is there anything else that is interesting in the story that you would like to discuss? Paper played such an important role. That’s actually very counterintuitive for people who mostly work in technology. Sometimes, the simple solution stares at you in the face and you just ignore it.

Rob Langdon: I just talked to one other healthcare company that’s rapidly developing. One of their observations is that you want to be ahead of the curve or behind the curve, but you don’t want to be right on the curve. The problem that we saw with technology is that everyone at that specific moment was trying to come up with a technological solution and sometimes the better strategy is just to come up with a solution that works and you can sell and develop rapidly. Then, come up with a technological solution. That’s one observation in starting a company. I don’t know if we’re ahead or behind the curve, but we’re definitely not on the curve.

Second thing is we obviously bootstrapped it without having investors. That’s a big advantage. We needed only a few hundred thousand dollars to get the company going. Whereas, you’re going to require several millions of dollars to create an important software. We were able to provide that from our own savings. Therefore, the focus is entirely on product and getting customers. We didn’t have to worry about investor presentations and spending months on end over a deal. We wanted to establish the brand, get market share, and create excitement and charisma.

Sramana Mitra: You’re approaching $100 million at this point. Do you want to go public?

Rob Langdon: About four years ago, we sold a portion of the company. We had two private equity companies. We retain close to 50% of the company.

Sramana Mitra: Which private equity group is working with you?

Rob Langdon: Francisco partners was one of the first companies that specialized in healthcare IT. We’ve known them for three to four years previously. They work in the healthcare IT space very early on. We came to respect their ability to help companies grow. They have done a lot of fantastic exits.

Sramana Mitra: Francisco Partners is involved in the business. That means that they’re looking for an IPO.

Rob Langdon: Yes. We have aligned interest as far as an exit now. We still have a three to four year horizon at this point. It doesn’t mean that we won’t continue on some degree of involvement with the company.

Sramana Mitra: Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Building a Healthcare IT Company to $100 Million: Dr. Rob Langdon, Co-Founder of T-System
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