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Tag: Jeff Bussgang

Scaling is Hard. Case Study: athenahealth

There are many companies that are competing to be the “operating system” for small businesses. The theory is that with the advent of the cloud in the digital age, small businesses can leverage a suite of services from a technology vendor to manage all aspects of their work – from payments to record-keeping to marketing to customer communications.  Among those competing for this vision are PayPal/eBay, Square and Groupon, with each struggling to pull together pieces of the equation and, importantly, reach the small business in a cost-efficient manner at scale.

One company in Watertown, Massachusetts has been executing on this vision for over a decade with a winning approach for one vertical slice of the small business market:  physicians.  Although this is not typically how athenahealth is described, it is one way to describe what they are doing that mainstream members of the technology community might understand.  I have found it pretty amazing that so few people in the tech community know their story or understand the scale and scope of what they have achieved.  That is why I’ve chosen athenahealth for the third in my series on scaling (following Akamai and TripAdvisor).

Founding Story:  A Pivot

Athenahealth version 1.0 was a complete failure.  The company was originally founded in 1997 by Jonathan Bush (1st cousin of George W.) and Todd Park, a pair of Booz Allen consultants, as a physician practice management company for obstetrics.

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