Epic Systems (MyChart)

**Ben Gilbert** (0:00)
The answer is somewhere in the middle.

**David Rosenthal** (0:02)
Well, you texted me last night that you've made it to Singapore.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:04)
I made it to Singapore, yes. Anytime you're researching anything in US healthcare, you know it is time to stop your research process and start the episode once you've found Singapore. All right, let's do it.
Welcome to the spring 2025 season of Acquired, the podcast about great companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (0:45)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:46)
And we are your hosts. Listeners, today's episode is about a quiet company in rural Wisconsin that plays an enormous role in our lives. Epic Systems.

**David Rosenthal** (0:56)
Indeed, whether you know it or not.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:58)
Yes, you probably know them from their medical patient software, MyChart, that if you're listening to this, you most likely use. Epic is a very unusual company in so many ways. They do no marketing. They basically don't do any sales either. They often say no to potential customers who approach them. They don't negotiate, they don't discount. They never raised any venture capital, and they've never done any acquisitions in their 47 years of existence. They don't work remotely. Everyone is in person all the time. They notoriously have one gigantic campus on a farm with buildings designed to look like the Land of Oz, a Wizard's Academy, a tree house, a barn, a replica of New York's Grand Central Station, and an 11,000 seat auditorium underground. They have the majority of the US's major hospital systems using their software and of their over 600 customers, they have never lost a single one.

**David Rosenthal** (1:50)
Yeah, that is the craziest thing to me about this company. It is 47 years old, they have never lost a customer. Actually, we found out that's not totally true. They lost one customer once for six months, and then that customer came back six months later.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:04)
Yes. The company's founder, Judith Faulkner, is undoubtedly one of the great founders of our time. 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. Despite being large, and I think at this point they're close to six billion in revenue and over 14,000 employees, they have a stated goal to never go public and never be acquired. 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.

**David Rosenthal** (2:38)
Yes. We heard all sorts of stories about companies sniffing around Epic over the years, trying to buy the GE, Microsoft, Google, everybody you would imagine wants to buy this company, and it's never going to happen.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:51)
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 health care, is the most successful female entrepreneur in history.

**David Rosenthal** (3:05)
Almost undoubtedly.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:06)
Well, all right, then spoiler alert listeners.

**David Rosenthal** (3:10)
We'll discuss that at the end.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:11)
Yes. So the health care industry, there is so much wrong with the American health care system. That is an incontrovertible fact. There's nobody that's going to tell you, oh, actually, it's pretty good. It's not pretty good. It's a disaster. Runaway costs, burdens of administration, so much excess and waste causing, I think health care costs are now 18% of our GDP. So rather than trying to eat that whole elephant today and unpack the entire system, today's episode is about understanding Epic's role within it and how Epic became so dominant.

**David Rosenthal** (3:42)
Yep. And if you want to understand the system, you have to understand Epic.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:45)
Yep. Well, listeners, if you want to know every time an episode drops, check out our email list. It is the only place where we will share a hint at what our next episode will be. We'll share corrections from previous episodes and little tidbits that we learned along the way. So that's acquired.fm slash email. After this episode, come join the Slack, talk about it with us and the entire Acquired community afterwards. I bet there's a ton of people in the medical ecosystem hanging out in the Acquired Slack. That's acquired.fm slash Slack. If you want more acquired between each monthly episode, check out ACQ2, our interview show, where we talk to founders and CEOs who are building businesses in areas that we've covered on the show to go a little bit deeper. Search ACQ2 in any podcast player. So as we announced last episode, we have a very fun save the date for you. We can't say much yet, but after incredible listener demand over the years, we are finally coming to New York City with our friends at JP. Morgan Payments. So July 15th, mark your calendars. And if you want to be the first to find out what we are up to, sign up at acquired.fm slash NYC. This is going to be a night of absurdity.