Bootstrap First, Raise Money from Kleiner Perkins Later: William King, CEO of Zephyr Health (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What year does that bring us up to?

William King: I left London at the end of 2008.  It was great to learn about business, marketing, and management. The other thing that I’ve always been interested in is the world of technology, given all the devices that we have. The thing that really struck me at J&J was the staggering amount of data that we would purchase and generate. Obviously, a company of 120,000 employees and $60 billion in revenue will produce a tremendous amount of data. When I was in London, I became very fascinated with data. I’d always pay attention to data throughout my career. In fact, one of the things that I’ve learned early on is how critical data is in decision-making. Oftentimes at a big pharmaceutical company, you don’t know the outcome of your decision for many years. Think about drug development. It’s a 10-year cycle. It’s very expensive.

I became fascinated with how data help optimize processes and make the company more efficient. At the end of 2008, I was confronted with an interesting choice. J&J Corporate is in New Brunswick. I think it would have been reasonable for me to go back to corporate but I was so fascinated with this notion of data and the gaps in efficiency. I decided to come back to California. I finished my IDP. I had a couple of commitments that I had to finish for J&J. Ultimately, that was the nugget that presented itself for Zephyr Health. The observations that we saw at J&J really helped to fuel the enthusiasm that we have for bringing value and creating a solution for all of this fragmented data and putting it to good use.

Sramana Mitra: What exactly was going to be the format of how you were going to deliver the solution? Who was going to be the customer? What was your thinking at that point?

William King: As an entrepreneur, if I were to speak to other entrepreneurs, I would say is it’s very important to pay attention to your product, ideas, and market, but it’s also important to open the aperture and look at trends. Look at what’s happening more broadly. In my case, outside of healthcare. One of the things that I paid attention to was the rise of cloud computing and these new data storage systems. It was the open source, data storage, and cloud computing that all were very interesting. In particular, the idea that databases used to be highly structured and relational that had very defined schemas. What we were observing is the rate at which data was being produced.

In the early to mid ’90s, to accommodate the rate at which new data is coming in, to do that with the tools that were available would have been very clumsy and expensive and would have to require highly specialized expertise. What we saw on the computing side was a trend in cloud computing that would accommodate solutions for us in a very rapid and inexpensive manner so that we could quickly get going with initial proofs of concept. This notion of bootstrapping is critical—not just defining it on a piece of paper but actually going out and trying to solve a real problem. That was how we approached this opportunity. It was about rapid proof of concept and using contemporary open source technologies that would help bring together very large data sets rapidly in a cloud-based environment, and then taking that to prospective customers and getting their response to it. Those were some of the catalysts that helped fuel Zephyr in the early days.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Bootstrap First, Raise Money from Kleiner Perkins Later: William King, CEO of Zephyr Health
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