Bootstrapping with Services to $20M: Visiquate CEO Brian Robertson (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Until $80 million, it was a bootstrapped company and then Bain capital infused $15 million. Is that what you are saying?

Brian Robertson: Yes, it was mostly bootstrapped. There were friends, family, and angels in the early rounds. 

Sramana Mitra: This is a bit vague. The kind of stories that I do are very precise. I need to know exactly how much money went into it, at what point, at what milestones because there’s a huge difference between a bootstrapped company versus a company that has had extra financing. 

Brian Robertson: I just have to blow off the cobwebs of the memory books here. It was capitalized with under $3 million in the very beginning and then we did an infusion in 2013 or 2014.

Ultimately, it was a combination of that infusion of capital, our growth, and the relationship with the Advisory Board. They were investing their dollars into product strategies that we could cross-sell, which made the company grow. 

Sramana Mitra: You left in 2008? When you left, did you sell your stake or did you keep it?

Brian Robertson: I did some secondary, then I rolled my stock, and kept it in play. In 2015, they did a deal with Thoma Bravo, and funded equity entered the picture. 

Sramana Mitra: That’s when you cashed out?

Brian Robertson: Yes, I had some liquidity at that time, but I was still a shareholder in that company.

Sramana Mitra: Tell me what happened in 2009 with your new company.

Brian Robertson: I founded Visiquate in 2009 in keeping with my vision of a tech platform. This was before the big data hype hit healthcare. We started dealing in the healthcare industry with clients that had a large number of disparate datasets, which meant a massive amount of complicated fragmented data or third-party data coming from insurance companies.

There was a lot of data and there were a lot of complexities. Some datasets were big and wide and some were small and narrow. Sometimes the small and narrow datasets matched up with the big and wide ones, and it was the perfect elixir for what the client needed.

I wanted to have a Big Data platform and focus more on a technology stack. I just had an entrepreneurial itch. I had to be in full control of my vision and really drive it forward. To help people move up in business analytics maturity has always been my passion.

If you look at the way Gartner, Forrester, The Data Warehousing Institute, and others talk about business analytics maturity, there are five stages. In stage one, you have traditional disparate data and data anarchy. In stage five, you have ubiquitous data, curated, and placed with the right users so that they could drive top line growth or bottom-line effectiveness.

People are afraid of customization, but we lean in towards it because it is the nature of the market. Given how complex the healthcare industry is and given the need for customization, you have to architect the platform that can deal with the fact that there is a variation on a client-by-client basis. In particular, this is how healthcare grows a lot through acquisition.

Very few of our clients are just on one system like Epic. Many of them are on multiple systems like Epic, Cerner, and Meditech. From numerous and various systems of records, they need to be able to consolidate their data into one system of record. At VisiQuate, we unify a lot of that data and create a truly longitude record designed to move the needle. 

This segment is part 4 in the series : Bootstrapping with Services to $20M: Visiquate CEO Brian Robertson
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