When Dave Morin (http://www.cielomedsolutions.com/about-leadership.asp) and I launched Cielo MedSolutions in 2005, we got lots of advice from lots of smart people. In retrospect, perhaps more than we needed. Some of it came from the smartest folks in the business universe (by their own assessment), namely, venture capitalists. A number of VCs told us, in so many words, that we’d be idiots to build a business providing application software (or software-as-a-service, SaaS, which is the direction we ended up going) for primary care physicians.
Why? Well, they pointed out that these docs worked in small practices, made little money, spent even less, were Luddites (neither appreciating nor understanding technology), yada, yada. Said we’d die a death of a thousand paper cuts selling software door-to-door. Overall, a pretty condescending attitude toward the primary care medical profession.
At the end of the day, the investor-types pointed to a circular argument: since they couldn’t identify any big, successful companies built on selling IT to the primary care medical profession, there would never BE such a company. (These VCs were probably cousins of the same bunch who, in the late 90’s, were saying “…I’d never invest in Sergey and Larry… they’re just kids... no business experience… dumb branding... Google’s such an obviously silly name… unproven business model…”)
So what did Dave and I do? We launched Cielo despite the naysayers. We found dedicated, engaged customers in the primary care community -- in large health systems and small clinics, in for-profit practices and free clinics (http://www.cielomedsolutions.com/education-success.asp). And we landed our investment capital elsewhere (http://www.cielomedsolutions.com/news-pr.asp).
And we proceed to build a pretty cool company (www.cielomedsolutions.com). The sweetest revenge is success ;~).
Jim Price
Chairman & Cofounder
Cielo MedSolutions (www.cielomedsolutions.com)
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