The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 56 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 2 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Epic Systems has the highest switching costs of any software in history
“I mean, this is the biggest switching cost piece of software ever.”
Rosenthal: Epic may be the most durable software company in history
“I think this is maybe The most durable software company in history.”
Epic is likely the world's most valuable vertical software company alongside Bloomberg
“Epic has gotta be the most valuable vertical market software company in the entire world. What else could possibly be up there? And so I started racking my brain. I was like, Bloomberg was the only one I could come up with that could. Plausibly maybe be as val…”
Epic controls which new software innovations can reach hospital physicians
“Epic is kind of the choke point of the industry at this point to decide what software innovations reach hospitals. I don't think it's overstating it to say if you're developing new breakthrough software to be used by physicians in hospital systems, Epic's kind…”
Rosenthal: Epic's Judy Faulkner is history's most successful female founder
“Judy is almost certainly the most successful by any measure female founder in history. I think that is actually true. I looked up to try and see who else might even come close.”
Epic's trust rules mandate its next CEO must be a software developer
“One, must be a longtime Epic employee, and two, must be a software developer.”
Epic has zero customer churn among its major hospital clients
“They have the majority of the U.S.'s major hospital systems using their software and of their over 600 customers, they have never lost a single one.”
90% of US medical students currently train on Epic's software
“And I think now, 90% of med school students train on Epic.”
Epic's core differentiation is its single unified database
“It is true that Epic's core database, the core single database, and this is Epic's big differentiation. There's only one database that every application pulls from.”
Public markets would value Epic Systems near $100 billion
“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 in the world and one…”
Epic screened candidates using a test written by the founder's 7th-grade son
“And for 18 years, listeners, that was how they tested to determine if someone should work at Epic.”
Zero-tolerance industries require single-vendor integrated software suites over modular solutions
“And so in a situation where you can't make any mistakes, the single vendor playbook is the right playbook, even if it's going to take 47 years to build the dominant company. You should have to write a lot of software, and it all has to work together really wel…”
Epic posts '10 Commandments' barring IPOs in every campus bathroom
“They have them posted in every bathroom and in every break room across the entire campus. And so any visitor who goes there and it's open to the public, you can just go in and see the 10 Commandments in the bathrooms there. The 10 Commandments are number one, …”
Epic is far harder to integrate with than other enterprise software
“But the result of this is that it's been much harder to integrate with Epic as an application developer than you would be used to in any other software category.”
Epic Systems has no sales department and only eight inbound salespeople
“There's not a sales or marketing department. There are eight or so salespeople, quote unquote, in the company who only react to inbound requests and they all came from either project management or technical specialists.”
Sequoia Capital acquired a massive secondary stake in Epic
“One fun thing is at one point in time, I think this was probably the 2000, maybe a pretty good chunk of those shares Made their way to Sequoia Capital.”
Epic operates with minimal middle management and zero divisional budgets
“So, because of that high level of trust, there's very few middle managers. You understand the system that everybody else works within, and you don't have to corral chaos. Most of the people they're hiring are right out of school, so they've been there for a lo…”
Government subsidies reward reliable enterprise software vendors over innovative ones
“It also is interesting because it basically rewards the most reliable software, not necessarily the most innovative software. You end up not taking any risk in situations like this because you're not going to get rewarded unless you actually stand the system u…”
Epic sends annual 1-5 report cards to hospital client executives
“So they will send separate report cards.
Every year to your CEO, CIO, and CFO, and they will grade you one through five on a bunch of dimensions, and then they will show you benchmark data against other customers at your peer set of like relative similar size …”
Judy Faulkner mandated universal data sharing across all Epic clients
“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. If you were enabling it worked across All Epic customers, even if they were your local competitor.”
Epic Systems has never raised VC or acquired another company
“They never raised any venture capital, and they've never done any acquisitions in their 47 years of existence.”
Probability of a third-party UI replacing Epic's backend is near zero
“The fear is that someone deploys to like a 70% of your customer base. They're all using some Chrome extension. They're all feeding the data into some nice UI. That nice UI is the thing everyone prefers to use. And then that UI vendors like, oh, instead of usin…”
Founder Judy Faulkner created a trust to prevent Epic's IPO
“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.”
Epic secured all 20 of the top US academic hospitals
“They announced that they have all 20 of the top academic hospitals in the U.S. News and World Report rankings.”
Epic is a massive enterprise company with virtually no business hires
“And it's not true, but it kind of rounds to true to say Epic basically never did hire any business people. It is essentially a big, gigantic company of programmers, logicians, implementation people who could be programmers, who think like programmers. That is …”
Hospitals want complete software suites from one vendor, not piecemeal tools
“Our customer, these hospitals, do not want to buy piecemeal solutions. They want to buy everything from one vendor, and they want that one vendor to provide the very best, most integrated experience possible.”
Epic's rivals scaled by gluing acquired companies together
“All their competitors along the way, or almost all of them other than Meditech, became 30 other companies glued together through M&A and take public, take private, crazy transactions.”
Epic generates $5.7B in revenue on $70K in equity
“They do 5.7 billion dollars in revenue today. They dominate an industry, at least here in the United States. And in total, they raise 70,000 of equity capital and 70,000 of bank debt.”
Epic's Cosmos platform holds anonymized data from 295 million patients
“Cosmos has 295 million patients worth of data in it, all anonymized.”
EpicCare was the industry's first Windows GUI EMR application in 1992
“And on the back of that in 1992, they launch Epic Care, which I believe is the first graphical user interface like Windows based EMR application in the entire industry.”
The Cures Act legally permits screen scraping against Epic's software
“The Cures Act makes things like screen scraping or Chrome extensions or RPA legal as a means to extract data from Epic. And there's nothing they can do about it. That is required allowed.”
Epic's closed strategy stems from a failed partnership with Philips
“I think it's still reasonable to say that some of the DNA of what Epic would become, and they would take tons of arrows for this closed, not interoperable, blah, blah, blah. Some of it stems from this failed partnership.”
Epic requires all applicants across every role to pass logic tests
“It's all systemized and catalogued and everybody takes one on the way in.
For every role in the company.
The culinary team we heard. Takes not full software developer tests, but logic tests on the way in.”
Epic Systems has never entered litigation or mediation with any customer
“Interestingly, though, they have never been in a lawsuit or even in mediation with a customer.”
Epic developers must drop everything to immediately fix their own bugs
“The whole system is designed around minimizing the number of hours between when a line of code is written and then when it is tested, so if a bug is found, then you drop everything as the original developer and you fix it so that you still have the whole conte…”
EMR vendors sell to hospital administrators, not clinicians
“When we say customer, we mean hospital CEO, CIO, the chief information officer, and CFOs. When we refer to their customers, that's who we're talking to. Obviously, the chief medical officer and all of the physicians and nurses and care folks are a part of that…”
Epic's corporate campus features an 11,400-seat underground auditorium
“It's 1700 acres. 410 of them are the campus. The rest is the farm. It now covers 89 buildings, There are four indoor auditoriums with 18,000 seats total. The big one, Deep Space, is the world's largest subsurface auditorium. There are 11,400 seats.”
Epic and Microsoft pioneered on-campus recruiting for high-agency roles
“Microsoft was really on the frontier Of hiring smart college grads and empowering them and letting them run free. Epic was doing the same thing, and this was not industry standard.”
Epic's average annual price increase is about 2%
“They do, but their average yearly increase is about two percent across the board.
So below inflation.”
Epic wins enterprise deals by guaranteeing zero failed implementations
“Epic has bet the whole company on having a reputation for, we don't have failed implementations. And that wins deals.”
Epic Systems spends 35% of its operating expenses on R&D
“The result of that is 35% of their operating expenses are spent on R&D.”
Epic's MyChart portal has 191 million active users
“Today there are a hundred and ninety one million active users of MyChart, and this is deduplicated. This is active, unique users of MyChart today.”
Epic software reportedly prevented 66M drug interactions in 2023
“Epic has a stat in 23, its system prevented sixty-six million potential adverse drug interactions and 250,000 potential surgical errors.”
Epic's share of Kaiser's $4B software project was $400M
“The headline number, as everyone reports it, it's a four billion dollar deal. They call it a four billion dollar three-year project, and that Epic's portion is around four hundred million.”
Winning the Kaiser contract propelled Epic to $162M in revenue
“After they signed Kaiser, they go to a hundred and sixty two million in annual revenue.”
Epic requires all employees to complete clinical immersion trips
“Everyone does immersion trips where the software developers, I mean, everyone is required to spend time in clinical settings like operating rooms to directly observe workflows.”