Solo Student Entrepreneur to $5M: David Liu, CEO of Deltapath (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Then what happens after 2011?

David Liu: Around 2015, we had the first investor. We had a high-net-worth individual who was interested in investing in the business.

Sramana Mitra: How did that person get involved? How did you find him?

David Liu: His son had just started a new e-commerce business and went public. He had some extra cash and wanted to invest in something related but not exactly e-commerce. He was introduced to us. We raised a million dollars.

Sramana Mitra: You had already how much revenue at this point?

David Liu: Just around $2 million.

Sramana Mitra: From those three partners – Polycom, Nokia, and Juniper?

David Liu: We also had a couple of other customers. One of them is called The Executive Center. I’m not sure if you’ve heard of them because they’re more in the emerging markets. They opened up a hundred offices.

Sramana Mitra: What did you pitch to the investor? How would you accelerate the business?

David Liu: Sales and marketing. Before 2015, we didn’t have a sales and marketing person.

Sramana Mitra: You were doing all the selling?

David Liu: Yes, which is not scalable. That enabled us to invest in hiring sales. We hired sales teams in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan. We suddenly doubled our team size in two years. We hired on a rapid scale.

Sramana Mitra: That translated into business?

David Liu: Yes. I mentioned Japan because, at around the same time, we were invited by the Japanese government to help design the future hospital communication system. They have a medical informatics ICT committee chaired by a bunch of professors.

They were trying to solve the inefficiencies of the hospital. They’re trying to solve the aging population problem. They forecast a lot more patients and less staff, but they don’t want to compromise care quality. They were trying to squeeze every unproductive thing inside hospitals. One of them was nurse calls. There’s a button you can press for the nurse.

In the old days, a light came on at the nurse station when you press that button. A nurse comes in and checks out what you need. They get what you need and come back. There’s a lot of movement and it causes fatigue. It’s also slow. You have to spend time back and forth. You also cannot prioritize. They want us to be able to show the patient’s location, diagnostics, and needs even before they answer the call.

With that in mind, we were one of the vendors that they invited. They invited Fujitsu, NEC, and all these other Japanese brands. They also invited Cisco and us. I asked them how they knew about us. They just found us on the internet via a professor. This professor invited us. We took the opportunity seriously. I didn’t speak any Japanese. We supported their proof of concept. We were really excited that, at the end of the day, they shortlisted us and Cisco. They had to make a decision on which one to go for. Luckily, they selected us over Cisco.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Solo Student Entrepreneur to $5M: David Liu, CEO of Deltapath
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