Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, I don’t think so. Ultimately, their biggest point of differentiation being the single platform, didn’t matter that much in that phase. Everybody else was starting up new, and they hadn’t built that much without it. There wasn’t that much computing adoption among hospitals generally, so didn’t really matter. I think what was happening is they had this nascent market in the proto EHR world, where they were able to sell something small enough at enough of a profit to be self-sustaining while they bided their time and built out the bigger suite. They were able to basically use time as a resource that most people don’t flex. Most entrepreneurs want to do something in a short period of time, usually because their capital structure demands it. You launch a platform and try to get other people to build the applications because you’re in a really, really dynamic, fast changing market. Or you launch an application on a platform that somebody else built similarly because you’re in a dynamic changing market. Epic’s market was developing slowly over a long period of time. They were willing to run a small business for a long period of time, and then grow into building all the functionality for the eventual huge market that wanted all the functionality tied together. So then what powers do they have today as the scale incumbent? A lot is the answer. A lot. The most obvious one is switching costs. This is the biggest switching cost piece of software ever.…

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