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.

Sramana Mitra: Contract software doesn’t have to be body shop, right? Contract software is contract software but there are very high-end contract software companies.

Terry Ryan: I don’t have an idea what you mean by contract software.

Sramana Mitra: When you’re asked to write software according to their specs as opposed to buying products that you designed.

Terry Ryan: This is different than that. This is being hired by a global company like British Petroleum and being asked to come in and consult them on how to build world-class database engines that can shift through terabytes of data in milliseconds to get business-relevant analytics.

Sramana Mitra: How long did that continue? How far did you take it and how big was it?

Terry Ryan: It involved about 740 people. We were global. We had offices over in London and were starting to do business in China. We built that for 10 years and started to run into some challenges of being a global company like scaling, having offices around the world, and building teams around the world. We couldn’t do that fast enough for what our client needed. We looked at the marketplace and said, “Who in the marketplace could be an existing platform that may be had some love and passion around that space.” We looked at a lot of different players and decided at that time in 2006 to sell to Hewlett Packard who pitched to us that they were trying to shift their model from hardware and more into management services around the hardware like IBM had done. They wanted to extend their services footprint around the globe and we were acquired for that purpose by HP.

From 750 people in my Knightsbridge organization, I went to managing 3,600 people globally. When you look at it, we were one of the pre-eminent players out there. We never almost ran into HP but HP still had almost 3,000 people across the globe working on the same types of projects. I was the worldwide leader for that. I ran that for 16 months after they acquired us. I was not required to do that. It wasn’t a condition of the acquisition but I did that with eyes wide open. It was a lot of fun. It was interesting to see a machine of that size work.

Sramana Mitra: Was that entirely self-financed?

Terry Ryan: No, we did three rounds of venture capital. It was the same venture capitalist who came in around year four moving with his career—buying out the previous rounds but also scaling the business. He’s also the backer of my current company. We also acquired a company. I was the guy responsible for leading the organization, negotiating, and integrating it with HP.

Sramana Mitra: By the time you sold the company to HP, you had a substantial exit under your belt.

Terry Ryan: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: You sold in 2004?

Terry Ryan: 2006.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Building an Exciting Healthcare IT Company From Chicago: LaunchPoint CEO Terry Ryan
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