Acquired / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
74 published records
01 / evaluation
“They never raised any venture capital and they’ve never done any acquisitions in their 47 years of existence. They don’t work remotely.”
02 / belief
“We’ll share corrections from previous episodes, and little tidbits that we learned along the way.”
03 / belief
“We digitized, but we didn’t transform in the way that I think people were optimistically hoping for.”
04 / belief
“I think that across those 295 million patients, there’s data from 15 billion individual patient encounters.”
05 / belief
“You’re starting to get these political wins of, hey, everyone wants a good system for electronic medical records. We think in the abstract there’ll be a lot of good that comes from it.”
06 / belief
“Thomas’ NHS Trust, which was (I think) their biggest ever single implementation and happening in the UK.”
07 / belief
“In 2006 already, I think everybody knows in America the current healthcare system sucks.”
08 / belief
“Small. But I think to get to this point that we’ve been hitting in a bunch of different ways, as long as you can win deals in the short-term early days without sales and marketing spend, and you can just spend all of your costs or as much as possible on R&D, that R&D does compound over time to give you a big competitive advantage later in life that other forms of spend do not.”
09 / belief
“” The quote, I actually don’t think it was at all about catching up with the rest of the world on digitization. I think we were a leader there.”
10 / belief
“I think that’s how you sum up Epic. This altruistic piece is despite certainly being expensive, they basically never raise prices once you’re a customer.”
11 / belief
“To be clear, I think especially after the Kaiser win, Epic was going to become the dominant player anyway, absent of meaningful use.”
12 / commitment
“I would for sure buy shares of Epic at $100 billion. There’s no way I will ever be allowed to, but I would love to.”
13 / belief
“What are things that we just all agree on are good ideas for the country that should happen? And let’s just pass some legislation that rewards the crap out of people with free money for doing the things that we think are a good idea anyway.”
14 / belief
“I was trying to square in my mind earlier when we were telling the meaningful use story, how on the one hand it really was obviously good for Epic, an accelerant, and it further cemented the market dynamics where they were already emerging as the leader.”
15 / belief
“I think so too. It’ll be useful for clinical trials. It’ll be useful for research.”
16 / belief
“I think you could argue that they do have process power, I think is the last one I would say, in their development process, the language that they use, and it being unique to Epic.”
17 / commitment
“There’s a great read called An Epic Dystopia. I will say this article presents a one-sided view of things.”
18 / uncertainty
“Most fairly good ideas are adjacent to even better ones.” I just thought, I don’t know.”
19 / uncertainty
“I have three institutions that I’ve gone to over the years for various other stuff that are all on Epic. I don’t know why that one hospital is still on Cerner.”
20 / observation
“Buffet’s been running Berkshire for over 50 years. But in Judy’s case, having 47 years to imbue the founder’s personality into the organization as it’s built all the way to this scale is really rare and really powerful.”
21 / uncertainty
“If they classify those eight people that they employ as “salespeople” as headcount, maybe they spend, I don’t know, not much.”
22 / belief
“Judy has announced that upon her death, all of her voting shares, so the 100% voting control that she has at the company, will transfer into a “purpose trust” that will be administered by three constituencies: (1) Her family—her husband Godon if he’s still alive, and their three children, (2) A set of five longtime senior managers from Epic, and (3) I believe three customer CEOs, CEOs of big customers.”
23 / belief
“Meanwhile, I think post-Oracle acquisition, Oracle’s trying to rewrite it all anyway.”
24 / observation
“You also can’t do their clever bundling in a bunch of free stuff that you might want to use in the future unless you have the scale economies also. They just develop a lot of software that they either throw in for free or offer to you in the future, and the only way you can develop that much software is have a huge number of customers to amortize it across.”
25 / belief
“If you’re looking for a smoking gun on regulatory capture, I think the right way to characterize this is as regulatory tailwind rather than regulatory capture.”
26 / commitment
“Bush also says, “We will do more to make this coverage portable, so workers can switch jobs without having to worry about their health insurance.”
27 / belief
“I think the basic bull case on ambient voice, ambient AI, is this is a great new product revenue opportunity.”
28 / belief
“Here are the doctors who treated those patients, so this has already happening quite a bit (I think) with rare diseases and crazy cases.”
29 / belief
“I think at this point in history, 2025, when the customer wants to do something a certain way and Epic wants to do something a certain way, ultimately Epic is customer-focused, so they will do whatever the customer wants, but they’re going to lay out very compelling convincing arguments why their way is the correct way.”
30 / belief
“I believe the Rockefeller Foundation was behind funding all this, call back to our Standard Oil episodes.”
31 / uncertainty
“I don’t know if it was just Northwest or they had maybe some other smaller regional operations at the time, but they had a Pacific Northwest, small region based in Portland, Oregon.”
32 / belief
“Runaway costs, burdens of administration, so much excess and waste causing (I think) healthcare costs are now 18% of our GDP.”
33 / belief
“I think that’s right. Listeners, what we’re talking about is the American Girl doll company founded by Pleasant Rowland in Madison, Wisconsin.”
34 / commitment
“Now, we haven’t really talked about Cerner so far in this episode. Part of Oracle today, as we will get into later.”
35 / belief
“I don’t even know if the designers did that, but I think Judy and the company were like, well this feels like a Wisconsin Lakes lodge.”
36 / belief
“Meanwhile, her son (I think) was in seventh grade or something like that, and was doing these programming competitions around the state.”
37 / belief
“I think there may even have been some pipe dreams of like, oh, we’re going to commercialize this and sell it to other hospitals.”
38 / belief
“I think also because the flat organization, you’re also doing it alongside other senior people and learning from them directly.”
39 / belief
“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.”
40 / belief
“Exactly, there a roll-up. And I think some of their biggest companies are vertical market healthcare and healthcare IT companies within Constellation.”
41 / commitment
“The compromise is we will create Medicare for those over 65 and Medicaid if you have a low income or other special situations.”
42 / belief
“On the back of that, in 1992, they launch EpicCare, which I believe is the first graphical user interface, like Windows-based EMR application in the entire industry.”
43 / uncertainty
“I don’t know about the industry, but for Epic, which I guess now for the industry.”
44 / belief
“I think now is the right time, while we’re talking about the campus and Epic culture, to really talk about Epic culture.”
45 / uncertainty
“I think that’s a red herring. We don’t know what the bottom line price looks like.”
46 / belief
“The crazy thing is, I think when American Girl moved out, Epic bought some of their furniture.”
47 / evaluation
“There are some financial controls of course, but Judy’s got this great story that she used to go see customers and they’d say, oh this is the right thing to do.”
48 / observation
“As we told the story, they had the better product, they had the better customer offering, they were on the way to winning anyway.”
49 / belief
“I would argue there are two big reasons Epic wins today. One is reliability. But the reliability also comes from the fact that it’s all built on one database.”
50 / belief
“Epic’s been doing this forever. This is the Epic way that (I think) the rest of the world woke up to and startups internalized as doctrine.”
51 / belief
“I think you saw it originally with Chronicles, her abstract creative thought, the notion of an epic, the Greek epic is this big story, this big longitudinal, historic event.”
52 / belief
“The current competitive set is now what we’re dealing with, and we think the current competitive set is good enough that this is shovel-ready enough that we want the best ones to get implemented everywhere.”
53 / observation
“Almost the only way in which Epic intersected with Silicon Valley in the entire company’s history, but this is a crazy point.”
54 / belief
“I think the answers have gotten out on the Internet, but for a long time was used.”
55 / belief
“I think when you start you have to do five of them, and then you do more every year.”
56 / belief
“We talked to dozens of people and I think we can probably thank four or five of them specifically on air.”
57 / belief
“Taylor Swift and Oprah, which we’ve talked about, and we did our Taylor Swift update at the Chase Center Show last year. We think the enterprise of Taylor Inc is “only” worth about $11 billion.”
58 / belief
“Do you know what other great American company from Madison, Wisconsin also started in that same office space, and I believe overlapped.”
59 / commitment
“How are we going to attract them to Verona, Wisconsin? Well we are going to create a paradise for them.”
60 / belief
“Fast forward to today, I think that is actually the single biggest reason why Epic wins over their competitors.”
61 / uncertainty
“I don’t know anything you just said, so I got to go look it up because none of that made any sense to me.”
62 / belief
“I do remember this. I think I might have had one. No, I have one of the U2 iPods, the red and black one.”
63 / belief
“I want to see what it’s like there. She’s really impressed by Redmond as I think anybody who goes there would be.”
64 / uncertainty
“Many, many times—I don’t know if the number is close to 100% or some large percent of the time—they just don’t interview you.”
65 / prediction
“Totally, and I think a huge part of what enabled this building software is not necessarily a capital-light activity.”
66 / evaluation
“There was this era where hospitals thought that EMRs should be their IP that they develop and have a competitive advantage over other hospitals because their EMR was better.”
67 / prediction
“By the way, again, inpatient activities are probably going to be your majority revenue stream because that’s where the most expensive, most complex care is happening, kind of similar to Medicare is your most important payer relationship because old people is where the most complex, most expensive care is happening, So you’ve got that, and then you’ve got Resolute, the billing system, all single database, all tied together, all built on top of it.”
68 / evaluation
“Which I think really should just tell you how important the stability and continuity of the system across inpatient, outpatient, and billing is, because Epic is the only one that can offer that.”
69 / evaluation
“A great software business for a local entrepreneur in Madison, Wisconsin, I think is how you would describe that.”
70 / evaluation
“Now, this was a little self-serving on Judy’s part because Cerner was not good at ambulatory.”
71 / recommendation
“Just imagine dollars out of your pocket for healthcare and don’t even just pick this year, pick a 10-year period because stuff might come up.”
72 / evaluation
“I think that’s the right way to look at it. They’re customer-obsessed because in the long-term, that is the right thing to do for Epic also.”
73 / commitment
“I started Googling obituaries and I came across her mom’s obituary where I learned this, and the company actually confirmed this to us.”
74 / evaluation
“Despite being large—I think at this point they’re close to $6 billion in revenue and over 14,000 employees—they have a stated goal to never go public and never be acquired.”