Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Philippe d’Offay, CEO of PMD (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What you described is a very interesting organizing principle for organizational behaviour.

Philippe d’Offay: It was fascinating. I’m one of those people who can’t just stop thinking about identifying the solution to the problems.

Sramana Mitra: When you figured this out, you were able to put back the right dynamics in place?

Philippe d’Offay: Yes. Another really interesting thing happened as well. The people that we had hired in the past and the people who worked really well in that small environment were not the same people that we had to hire as we were growing. I call it the soldier mercenary type of environment. Earlier, we had these people who would just do whatever you told them to do.

Then all of a sudden, those people had to decide if they were willing to report to somebody else. Some of them were willing and some. So we had to start thinking about hiring people. The people who wanted a little bit of safety and wanted a little bit of structure were seeking mentorship and guidance. They wanted to be led by seasoned managers. We had to pivot in how we hired. Once we figured that out, we were able to go from 5 to 10. Eventually, we hit 15 people. Then we had another issue where it just fell apart. That was an interesting time as well.

Sramana Mitra: What was the reason this time?

Philippe d’Offay: This time was really about communication. We had exceeded that ability for any one person to know everything that was happening at PMD. Although we were working very hard and doing all the things necessary to make sure that everybody was communicating with one another, we had people who felt like they were being left out. There were people who didn’t quite know what was going on despite the fact that they are attending a meeting where we told them what was going on. It was a communication thing.

To me, I went back to that rule of five. I thought, “What’s happening here that might be related to this small group dynamic that people work best in?” I realized that we needed people who could run their own companies within a company. That would be someone who I would communicate with who would then have their own conversations with their group of people that reported to them. The other thing that was tough at that time was that I had 14 people reporting to me. I just didn’t have the time for it.

I felt like I was pulled in every different way and none of the things I was doing were helping the moral problem. I needed to first limit the people who reported to me to something that I could live with where I wasn’t working 24 hours a day. I made each of those people responsible for doing the same with the people who reported to them. That was how we got through that.

Sramana Mitra: What year is this?

Philippe d’Offay: Right now. We started the year with 13 people, and we’re now at 26 people.

Sramana Mitra: You’ve talked to me about BlackBerry being an inflection point. You haven’t mentioned the iPhone impact on your business. That must have been huge.

Philippe d’Offay: It was. I was wrong. It was 2006 when we released the BlackBerry version.

Sramana Mitra: That’s what I thought. The iPhone came out in 2007.

Philippe d’Offay: We were one of the first medical software companies to be listed on the Apple Store. That changed everything. We ended up sunsetting our BlackBerry version because iPhone took over. We’ve been iOS-compatible and now, Android-compatible since then. Just pretty much every doctor that I’ve met was using a BlackBerry.

When the iPhone came out, doctors were using an iPhone in ways that they had never used the Blackberry. The doctors were involved with large-scale arguments in some of the hospitals we were working with. Doctors were getting to the point where they were saying, “You can’t stop us from bringing us our iPhones into work.” The hospitals were like, “Yes, we can because there’s a lot of security around that. You need to use these computers that we bought you.” The doctors were like, “No.”

That was the biggest keys to our success. It was the fact that doctors won that war and that every single doctor out there has got an iPhone or an Android. They’re essentially carrying the power of a supercomputer in their pocket and we can write software that runs on it. It bypasses that 20-year technology cycle that I talked about earlier in healthcare.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Philippe d’Offay, CEO of PMD
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