Taking a Capital Efficient Company Public and Beyond: Medidata CEO Tarek Sherif (Part 2)

Tarek Sherif: Working for a large corporation was a good experience in the sense that I figured out what I didn’t want to do. I came out of there determined to never be in a role where I didn’t have a large measure of control.

As I used to joke about it, I ended up becoming CEO of Medidata, because I don’t like having a boss. But those are defining moments when you learn those kinds of things.

When I left GE, I ended up spending about four to five years working with another gentleman who was running a family office that was investing in the public markets as well as private startups.

So it was one family’s money. I started to get to understand the buy-side much better. By working at Brown Brothers, I really got to see a lot of the sell-side. By working in my next role, I got to see a lot of the buy-side.

At GE, what I did was a lot of M&A work, looking to do acquisitions for the GE Capital portfolio. That’s the first time I actually started to learn about the industry that I ultimately ended up making my career in.

At that time, we were investing in contract research organizations. They were a new idea. There were some that had just gone public like Quintiles. We actually got to know them very well. We flew down to Quintiles a bunch of times. We talked to the CEO and the folks there and learned about the CRO industry. There were also a number of healthcare data companies that became prominent in the mid-90s.

I worked with this gentleman, like I said, for about five years. I wanted to have a sort of broader mandate. We ended up going our separate ways. I did the same kind of thing on my own for a number of years until I’d met the other two founders of Medidata, Glen De Vries and Edward Ikeguchi.

It was just one of those chance meetings. What happened was that my college roommate happened to be an advisor to Glen and Ed who were both up at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. Ed was a doctor while Glenn was doing technology as well as science up there.

In the mid-90s, they had thought about the idea of Medidata just when the internet was starting. But they shelved the idea for a number of years. They’d been involved in some clinical trials and seen the frustration there.

My college roommate, in a funny story, was listening to them talk about starting the company. He said, “That’s a really great idea and a terrible idea at the same time. You know technology. You know medicine. You guys know nothing about money, companies, or corporate structures.” They both received that quite well and said, “What should we do about it?” He ultimately said, “I know somebody who I think knows something about money.” That was me, and he introduced us.

Our first meeting ended up being a five-hour meeting. We just effectively fell in love just talking about the business opportunity, talking about each other’s lives, and just getting to know each other. We separated that day saying, “Look, we don’t know exactly how we should work together, but it feels like we should work together somehow. So let’s just keep talking.”

What happened was over about a two to three month period, we were talking to each other quite a bit. Back then, you didn’t have video conferencing. You didn’t really have cell phones that were affordable. So we ended up on the phone or we ended up in each other’s offices.

About three months into that, much like you’d find in a romance, we said, “We spent so much time together, maybe we should move in together.” So one day I moved from the office that I was using into the office that they had.

I sat down next to Glen de Vries who is our President and co-founder. He’s a very close friend of mine. For 20 years, he and I have been sitting together. We’ve changed rooms, but we always sit together and share an office. It led to a lot of great adventures at Medidata and some of the philosophy behind how we structured the company.

We have 13 offices now and about 28 employees. We have an open plan seating in all of our offices. So very few people actually have their own offices. That came out of this idea that we could share ideas. We would listen to each other’s conversations. We became knowledgeable about what the other person was involved in.

Glen is very much a technology visionary and a visionary in the industry. I can hold my own in conversations and much like I usually handle the shareholder conversations or finance, he more than held his own in those same conversations. But it’s through that sort of back and forth and sharing of ideas that I think we founded and created a very solid company for us.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Taking a Capital Efficient Company Public and Beyond: Medidata CEO Tarek Sherif
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