Epic Systems (MyChart)

The answer is somewhere in the middle.

Well, you texted me last night that you've made it to Singapore.

I made it to Singapore, yes. Anytime you are researching anything in U.S. healthcare, you know it is time to stop your research process and start the episode once you've found Singapore. [laughing] [sighs] All right, let's do it.

Who got the truth? Is it you, is it you, is it you? Who got the truth now? Is it you, is it you, is it you? Sit me down, say it straight, another story on the way. Who got the truth?

Welcome to the Spring twenty twenty-five season of Acquired, the podcast about great companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert.

I'm David Rosenthal.

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.

Indeed, whether you know it or not.

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 forty-seven 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 wizards academy, a tree house, a barn, a replica of New York's Grand Central Station, and an eleven-thousand-seat auditorium underground. They have the majority of the US's major hospital systems using their software, and of their over six hundred customers, they have never lost a single one.

Yeah, that is the craziest thing to me about this company, is forty-seven 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.

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 fourteen thousand employees, they have a stated goal to never go public and never be acquired, and Judith, at age eighty-one, has created a succession plan and a trust structure for her voting shares to ensure that that will stay true forever.

Yes, we heard all sorts of stories about companies sniffing around Epic over the years trying to buy them: GE, Microsoft, Google. You know, everybody you would imagine wants to buy this company, and it's never gonna happen.