Disinfecting Hospitals, Impacting Healthcare: Morris Miller, CEO of Xenex (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: The Internet was not yet on the horizon.

Morris Miller: The Internet was not there. When I was in Law School, I read an article in the Forbes magazine. It talked about how Steve Jobs had just raised money for NeXT computer.

Sramana Mitra: My husband used to run NeXT computer.

Morris Miller: They published this article and there was this one line in the article that said, “These NeXT computers are going to have read-write CD-ROMS and you’ll be able to put a library’s worth of information on a disk.” I called my dad and said, “When you’re in Law School, they allow you to use Westlaw’s Lexus to research case law as much as you want. Then, when you go clerk in the summer, you can use it in the summer but not if you’re actually doing research for the clients. Once you graduate from law school, it’s somewhere between $250 to $500 an hour to use this. If we put the case law [on CD-ROMs], we could have the market to ourselves and it would be a great business. Now the lawyers could walk around with all of the case law in their pockets instead of on these thousands of law books.“ My dad said, “That’s great. You need to finish law school. You need to get a job at a very good law firm and then do anything that you want.”

I didn’t tell anybody about the idea. To me, that was one of the rules of entrepreneurship. You need to know when to share an idea and you need to know when to keep it quiet. Literally, for the next two years, the only person who knew my idea was my dad. That was it. During weekends, I would go in and I’d count the number of characters and pages. I’d go state by state. I’d go through all the National Reporter Series to determine what volume of characters would I need to have typed in order to put all of these on CD-ROMs. On graduation, I joined this law firm here in San Antonio. It was the largest firm in San Antonio. In terms of coming back here, it was the place you’d want to practice law.

Within three months, I told the managing partner my idea. He said, “Wow! That’s a good idea. What can we do to help you?” The deal with the law firm was as long as I delivered billable hours with them, they don’t necessary worry when and how you get them. They gave me a great deal of freedom to go out and pitch the idea. That’s what I did. For two years, I would get people to sign a confidentiality agreement, which nowadays is impossible to have somebody to sign. Back then, people signed it. Nobody was doing this at that time. Nobody had even thought about it. Like you said, it was pre-Internet. I used to walk with a demo CD-ROM. People would look at it and they’d say, “Is that like the thing that they play music on?” I’d say, “Yes. It’s just like for music but this one has a library on it.”

This segment is part 2 in the series : Disinfecting Hospitals, Impacting Healthcare: Morris Miller, CEO of Xenex
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