Disinfecting Hospitals, Impacting Healthcare: Morris Miller, CEO of Xenex (Part 3)

Morris Miller: I got 168 No’s before I finally found an investor to say Yes. I would work Monday through Friday. I’d work the weekend. I’d work the next Monday through Friday and the next weekend. Then, I might take three days off and go to New York to pitch somebody. Back in 1992, the venture capital community existed but it was very small and they didn’t necessarily interact with a brand new entrepreneur the way your incubator is facilitating that now. That’s the amazing thing. Today, a guy like me could go to an incubator. Then they’d say, “Let’s spike the idea. Let’s get it going and see what kind of market reception there is.” Back then, you couldn’t do that. You literally had to go find individual angels step by step.

Sramana Mitra: How much did you raise?

Morris Miller: $1.25 million.

Sramana Mitra: From one angel?

Morris Miller: He put in the majority of it and then he had five or six friends put in the balance.

Sramana Mitra: You wanted to put the case law on CD-ROM and sell it to lawyers?

Morris Miller: Yes. You deliver the disk upfront for one price. Then it was $100 a month.

Sramana Mitra: For updates?

Morris Miller: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: That was the business you started in?

Morris Miller: 1992.

Sramana Mitra: How did that go?

Morris Miller: It went great. We grew that business. We had an exclusive work for legal publishing for compression software. I had that deal with PKZip. Do you remember PKZip?

Sramana Mitra: Yes, I do.

Morris Miller: That’s how you would zip a file back then. They made a run-time decompression version of the software for us. The case law that I could put on one disk, they would have it on six. Back in those days, if you want to change disks, you’d have to hit eject and it would unload the disk. Then, you’d put the next one in and it’d say loading. It can take 45 seconds to a minute. Then it would finally load and then you’d have to run the search on the next disk. It was terrible.

If you worked for one of the competitors, I’d say, “Sramana, let’s give the lawyers a chance to really know. Let’s go head to head.” It got to a point where all of our competitors won’t do head to head because we do a search once and they’d have to do it six times. It was ridiculous. We ended up selling that company to Lawyers Cooperative Publishing just before they bought West Publishing. That was all Thomson Reuters.

Sramana Mitra: How much revenue were you doing when you sold? How much did you sell it for?

Morris Miller: The guy who bought it is on my board now. We’ve never disclosed it, but millions.

Sramana Mitra: So you had a good exit. How many years were you doing this?

Morris Miller: We sold it in October 25, 1995.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Disinfecting Hospitals, Impacting Healthcare: Morris Miller, CEO of Xenex
1 2 3 4 5 6 7