Judy Faulkner, every mention
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Google Part I: Origins of Search. How the Best Business in Human History Happened (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 50:03 David Rosenthal Judy Faulkner wrote Epic on a DEC minicomputer, right?
Epic Systems (MyChart) · Acquired
- ▶ 2:05 Ben Gilbert The company's founder, Judith Faulkner, is undoubtedly one of the great founders of our time.
- ▶ 2:10 Ben Gilbert You probably don't know much about her or the company because the company is still privately held, and Judy and her family foundation own about half of it.
- ▶ 2:30 Ben Gilbert And Judith, at age 81, has created a succession plan and a trust structure for her voting shares to ensure that that will stay true forever.
- ▶ 2:51 Ben Gilbert And we'll dig into this at the end of the episode when we sort of have all the context and all the numbers, but I believe that Judith Faulkner, in starting one of the most valuable companies in healthcare, is the most successful female…
- ▶ 5:28 David Rosenthal Well, we start our journey in August, 1943, when Judy, today Faulkner, then Judy Greenfield, is born in Earleton, New Jersey, which is part of Cherry Hill, New Jersey, suburb of Philadelphia, right across the Delaware River there, not too…
- ▶ 5:58 David Rosenthal And of course, I don't think Judy really knew about all this at the time, but yes, indeed, it is a pretty auspicious time and place to be born because just about four years later, after Judy is born, just up the road a little ways from…
- ▶ 6:39 David Rosenthal But for the moment, Judy probably didn't know anything about this because her family is not in the tech industry growing up.
- ▶ 6:55 David Rosenthal And perhaps this is where Judy would later get her own entrepreneurial bent from.
- ▶ 6:59 David Rosenthal So that's Judy's father.
- ▶ 7:01 David Rosenthal Now, Judy's mother, Del Greenfield, was an absolute freaking dynamo.
- ▶ 7:54 David Rosenthal Judy Faulkner's mom was part of a group that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985.
- ▶ 8:14 David Rosenthal I was trying to learn more about Judy's family growing up, and I was trying to learn about the soda fountain and the pharmacy and the impact that her dad had on her future entrepreneurial career,
- ▶ 8:31 David Rosenthal Yes, Judy's mom won a share of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985.
- ▶ 12:58 David Rosenthal So, while she's at Wisconsin, Judy takes a class called Computers in Medicine, taught by a faculty member from the Wisconsin Medical School named Dr.
- ▶ 13:43 David Rosenthal So, Judy takes this class from Dr.
- ▶ 14:08 David Rosenthal So Judy says, yes, great.
- ▶ 15:38 David Rosenthal But before we go further on what Judy does next, I think it's worth taking a step back and talking about what are health records?
- ▶ 32:58 David Rosenthal Back to Judy now here at the University of Wisconsin.
- ▶ 33:12 David Rosenthal But he and Judy keep in touch.
- ▶ 33:14 David Rosenthal Judy's part of this community of programmers and computer scientists building applications for healthcare systems.
- ▶ 33:39 David Rosenthal So through this connection, Judy learns about mumps and she goes and learns mumps, the programming language, starts working on this problem.
- ▶ 35:08 David Rosenthal And that's what Judy writes here in the 19 seventies.
- ▶ 36:03 Ben Gilbert So you run Judy's database, you run Chronicles somewhere in your hospital building on a big mainframe.
- ▶ 36:15 David Rosenthal So, just like the projects in Boston at MGH were, the intention was to make the systems for use there at MGH, Judy at first, she's just making chronicles for the Wisconsin medical system.
- ▶ 36:39 David Rosenthal Other doctors at other academic institutions about this great system called Chronicles that they have, that this programmer that they employ, Judy Faulkner, has written and demand for it starts to spread virally and Wisconsin gets calls…
- ▶ 39:57 Ben Gilbert Alright, so David, Judy leaves her job.
- ▶ 41:10 David Rosenthal We talked about this a lot on our Microsoft episodes, but the critical thing about mini computers and especially for duty here and fledgling Epic was like a consumer wouldn't buy these things, but small businesses could and small…
- ▶ 41:38 David Rosenthal And Judy needs to buy one, and she also needs to fund the company.
- ▶ 43:48 David Rosenthal It's because Judy was a generational talent as a programmer.
- ▶ 43:55 David Rosenthal They had kind of a cornered resource as a startup, you know, Microsoft did in Bill Gates and Paul Allen too, but Epic totally did too in Judy.
- ▶ 44:33 David Rosenthal Judy gets the company's first office space in the basement of an apartment building at 2020 University Avenue in Madison, Wisconsin.
- ▶ 46:09 David Rosenthal So Judy's got the financing, she's got the computer, but she still doesn't know anything about building and running a company.
- ▶ 47:15 David Rosenthal This is a history turns on a knife point moment for Epic and Judy because the likelihood that she would get introduced to a business mentor who is also a software developer and not a business school graduate business guy.
- ▶ 47:45 David Rosenthal You wonder why Judy was so, uh, you know, averse to venture capital.
- ▶ 48:00 David Rosenthal Judy goes out, spends three days with Neil and gets a total crash course in setting up and running a company.
- ▶ 48:21 David Rosenthal And he shared the manuals with Judy.
- ▶ 48:43 David Rosenthal Totally natural that Judy's gonna do the same thing at Epic out of first the University of Wisconsin and then other schools.
- ▶ 50:08 David Rosenthal Its main product is the basic interpreter for Judy and the fledgling human services computing here.
- ▶ 51:42 Ben Gilbert Well, aside from the first name just being an awful name, you can start to see Judy's quirkiness come through.
- ▶ 1:21:47 David Rosenthal A different path than the one Judy took, let's say.
- ▶ 1:22:40 David Rosenthal And Judy says, no, that is a bad choice.
- ▶ 1:23:02 David Rosenthal Now, this was a little self-serving on Judy's part because Cerner was not good at ambulatory.
- ▶ 1:25:44 David Rosenthal I don't know if Judy was there as well, I assume she was too.
- ▶ 1:27:03 David Rosenthal And Judy's like, no, we're not going to do it.
- ▶ 1:33:54 David Rosenthal First is Judy's son, by this point in time, is actually working at Microsoft in Redmond as a developer.
- ▶ 1:34:03 David Rosenthal And Judy and Carl had always been inspired by Microsoft's way of doing things, and so one time when Judy's visiting her son, she's like, hey, can you go give me a tour of the campus in Redmond?
- ▶ 1:34:48 David Rosenthal So Judy comes back and basically copies the campus strategy of Microsoft almost exactly.
- ▶ 1:36:23 David Rosenthal Judy and the
- ▶ 1:38:08 Ben Gilbert To understand the company, you have to hold in your head that the DNA is both of those things concurrently, and I think it's because that's what Judy is.
- ▶ 1:40:05 Ben Gilbert Yeah, because the first thing that you have to understand is Judy refers to it as a software factory.
- ▶ 1:40:14 Ben Gilbert The biggest takeaway is, in Judy's mind, since they don't ever go buy any other companies, and they don't have any competencies at the company other than making software, what they are is a factory that churns out software.
- ▶ 1:40:35 David Rosenthal Apparently she was just ahead of her time with-
- ▶ 1:41:35 Ben Gilbert That shows how deeply Judy feels it needs to run in all of the employees.
- ▶ 1:44:35 Ben Gilbert 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.
- ▶ 1:44:44 Ben Gilbert She's like, that's stupid.
- ▶ 1:44:45 Ben Gilbert Or they would tell her, can we squeeze this in this year?
- ▶ 1:44:51 Ben Gilbert And she would say, well, that's also stupid.
- ▶ 1:50:20 David Rosenthal So, we mentioned that Judy's son was a programmer at Microsoft, and that's how she went to visit him, part of the inspiration for the campus.
- ▶ 1:50:35 David Rosenthal In the late eighties, Judy was hiring software developers and found that interviewing them just wasn't that predictive of whether they were going to be great software developers or not.
- ▶ 1:50:55 David Rosenthal And she was talking to him, I was like, well, you do these programming competitions and they're these tests
- ▶ 1:51:57 David Rosenthal But yeah, Judy's teenage son wrote the first test that is now no longer being used.
- ▶ 1:57:04 David Rosenthal And I think this comes from just Judy and who she is as a person.
- ▶ 2:09:09 Ben Gilbert Judy made the call personally that Care Everywhere wasn't a thing or shouldn't be a thing where their customers could pick and choose.
- ▶ 2:09:42 Ben Gilbert And Judy described it as pure luck that Epic was actually able to move ahead.
- ▶ 2:23:07 David Rosenthal And there is a fact pattern that opens Epic up certainly to criticism here, which is that Judy was on Obama's Health IT Council through all of this, which was advising
- ▶ 2:44:53 Ben Gilbert I mean, this is a testament to how Judy thinks a company should be run.
- ▶ 2:47:46 David Rosenthal Great for Epic and totally reinforces Judy's whole thesis of company building in this space and her whole story to customers of one single integrated platform that is hardcore about software development, that is 100% customer focused, that…
- ▶ 3:06:15 Ben Gilbert So, we started this episode talking about Judy's one of the most successful, if not the most successful, female founder of all time.
- ▶ 3:06:30 Ben Gilbert In twenty-twenty-one, Forbes estimates her net worth to be 7.6 billion, implying that the company is worth, what, fifteen billion?
- ▶ 3:07:27 Ben Gilbert My guess is if this is public, which it never will be, investors would value it somewhere in the hundred billion dollar neighborhood, giving Judy's shares a value of about fifty billion dollars and making her the wealthiest self-made woman…
- ▶ 3:09:05 Ben Gilbert Part of me is like, ooh, thank God Judy's putting it in a trust.
- ▶ 3:09:11 David Rosenthal Final chapter of the story here is Judy's 81 years old.
- ▶ 3:09:26 David Rosenthal Like you said, Ben, she owns about half the company economically and 100% of the voting shares.
- ▶ 3:09:49 David Rosenthal Judy has announced that upon her death, all of her voting shares, so the hundred percent voting control that she has at the company, will transfer into a quote-unquote purpose trust that will be administered by three constituencies,
- ▶ 3:21:28 Ben Gilbert So I was reading an article that said, Faulkner once described her approach as climbing a mountain, not trying to see the entire mountain at once, but by focusing on the next hill in front of her.
- ▶ 3:22:29 Ben Gilbert I just thought, I don't know, it just jumped off the page at me that Judy, who has almost certainly never read any of Paul Graham's writings, had this same insight
- ▶ 3:22:49 David Rosenthal I was thinking about Judy as this incredible software developer who became a founder of a company and this incredible business person and didn't follow any of the, you know, MBA rules.
- ▶ 3:23:39 David Rosenthal But the distance between Judy Faulkner and Paul Graham is actually not nearly as far as you would think.
- ▶ 3:27:27 Ben Gilbert And my last one, Judy is a wacky, wacky founder.
- ▶ 3:28:11 David Rosenthal You foreshadowed in the intro that Judy is almost certainly the most successful by any measure female founder in history.
- ▶ 3:30:56 Ben Gilbert 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
- ▶ 3:49:16 David Rosenthal I'm sure he has respect for Judy.
- ▶ 3:49:19 Ben Gilbert I mean, she's got a gold medal in the Capitalism Olympics, so you gotta respect it.
- ▶ 3:55:43 David Rosenthal Since there really isn't any canonical long form piece about the company out there, we thought we usually don't do this, but let's just email Judy and see if we can chat.
- ▶ 3:55:56 Ben Gilbert Thank you, Judy, for spending time with us and helping us understand all the missing details we had on Epic's company history.