Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Philippe d’Offay, CEO of PMD (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: There a lot of people trying to do the solution that you’re describing – this central electronic health record of a patient. Can you help me understand when you started this company, what was the competitive landscape like, and how has that competitive landscape evolved over the years as you have been in this business?

Philippe d’Offay: When we started, we invented Card Capture. Unbeknown to us, there were other companies who were, at the same time, coming up with the same idea. We focused on mobility. That was the key aspect of what would make us different against our competitors. On day one, there were no competitors. It didn’t seem like anyone was trying to do what we thought was a pretty brilliant idea, which was to get doctors to use a mobile device to keep track of their patients.

The first thing I learned about medical software at PMD and as I was researching was that there’s this general rule in healthcare that healthcare technology lags by 20 years from the general business community. Even today, things that we take for granted as individuals when we hail an Uber or we pay somebody using PayPal are technologies that don’t exist in healthcare and won’t exist in healthcare for a very long time.

The competitive landscape has changed. Within a year of us announcing our product, there were more than a dozen companies that were much better-funded than we were. Of those companies, I don’t know if there’s a single one that hasn’t either been acquired or gone out of business. We did extremely well against those companies who were trying to do what we were trying to do.

The key to our success against that initial wave of competitors was that we were a truly mobile software company. Our product was, hands-down, mobile, and doctors can use it anywhere.

Sramana Mitra: What year did you introduce this mobile technology?

Philippe d’Offay: 2001. We had been running it in beta. I finally got around to starting the software development for PMD in 1999, so it had two years of undercover development work. I hired a few people from Deloitte whom I had a lot of respect for. Two of them came on as programmers. Another one came on as an operations person. We were all working out of my condo in Atlanta for free. Nobody was getting paid.

Sramana Mitra: You were doing mobile at a time when mobile was not ubiquitous. What kind of configuration were you assuming? Were you giving doctors a special piece of hardware to do this out of? What was the go-to-market strategy?

Philippe d’Offay: You’ve picked up on one of the more humbling aspects of my journeys as an entrepreneur. At the time I was resigning from Deloitte, the Palm 2 existed. That was the device that I wrote the software for. The problem was that doctors did not use Palm Pilots. They couldn’t care less about it. They would never use it. Doctors just never adopted those devices. That made selling the product brutal.

I would, essentially, knock on doors. My cousin was very helpful in introducing me to people in his community. We got that first customer. I thought, “This is going to be easy.” It wasn’t. It was almost impossible to get a customer. One thing that we had going for us is that each customer that we brought on was so passionate and was such a strong supporter. Once they bought that Palm Pilot, we would get comments like, “I can never go back to using these index cards.” But it was much slower than I wanted it to be.

We started building up this community of really supportive customers. That then, in turn, led to more leads and more customers. It wasn’t easy. If you look at the growth chart of PMD, the inflection point was when we started supporting the BlackBerry devices because BlackBerry was the first device that could replace a cellphone and a pager for the doctors.

Sramana Mitra: What year was that?

Philippe d’Offay: 2007 was the year that we released the BlackBerry version.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Philippe d’Offay, CEO of PMD
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