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July 2000 - Royalties

2/27/2015

 
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A Virtual Turf War . . .
. . . is breaking out in the healthcare industry as emerging dot-com companies, established manufacturers, distributors, and traditional brokers scramble to establish competing Internet marketplaces for buying and selling everything from Band-Aids to JPI machines. At stake are potentially billions of dollars in revenue, savings for hospitals and their IT departments, and a controlling interest in the way health care goods are bought and sold in the future . . .

InfoWorld, July 3, 2000
The entrepreneurial pot of gold shone like a lump of clay.

The Internet can be an amazing thing...

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June 2000 - Posing

2/26/2015

 
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Hospital Purchasing Co-Ops Link Up to Make Buying On the Web Easier
Buying co-ops representing more than two-thirds of the nation’s hospitals are banding together with three fledgling electronic-commerce companies to demand that manufac- turers and distributors of medical supplies adopt standard product codes to ease the buying of supplies over the Internet, Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal reported . . .

Dow Jones Business News, June 14, 2000
Properly decorated and fluffed, the lightest of feathers can display a magnificent confidence.

I was still focused on the remnants of the capital-planning group in the company...

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May 2000 - Cliffhanger

2/25/2015

 
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Neoforma Lays Off 80 People
Just days after announcing the abandonment of previously announced merger agreements that would have added Eclipsys and its healthcare Internet affiliate HEALTHvision to its holdings, Neoforma.com has announced that it is laying off approximately 80 employees . . .

AuctionWatch, May 26, 2000
Thalia was one of those rare women who seemed completely oblivious to her extraordinary attractiveness...

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April 2000 - The Majors - Part Two

2/23/2015

 
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Major Medical Products and Services Companies Establish Global Healthcare Exchange
Johnson & Johnson, GE Medical Systems, Baxter International Inc., Abbott Laboratories and Medtronic, Inc. announced today that they are creating a global healthcare exchange that will be an independent Internet-based company . . .

Business Wire, March 29, 2000
Five of the Major Healthcare Products Distributors Are the Latest Members of the Healthcare Industry Creating Their Own Web Sites to Challenge Online Companies.
Facing competition from companies such as Healtheon/WebMD Corp. and Neoforma.com Inc., as well as a similar company being formed by a handful of medical device manufacturers, the drug and medical product distributors, such as Cardinal Health Inc. (CAH), are turning to the Internet to preserve and perhaps enhance their traditional role in the supply chain for healthcare products, an analyst said . . .

Dow Jones News Service, April 18, 2000
It was nothing personal. Business is business.

Okay, so we had a bit of a setback with the Eclipsys merger. So what. We had fought back many times before. This would be no different, right?...

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March 2000 - Fortune

2/21/2015

 
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Burning Up: Warning: Internet Companies Are Running Out of Cash—Fast
When will the Internet Bubble burst? For scores of Net upstarts, that unpleasant popping sound is likely to be heard before the end of this year. Starved for cash, many of these companies will try to raise fresh funds by issuing more stock or bonds. But a lot of them won’t succeed. As a result, they will be forced to sell out to stronger rivals or go out of business altogether . . .

Barron’s, March 20, 2000
Neoforma.com Chief Bridges Old and New Economies
Robert Zollars is not your stereotypical Silicon Valley chief executive. Before taking over the top three posts at Neoforma.com . . . he spent nearly 20 years working his way up the corporate ladder of the healthcare products industry . . . After less than a year at the helm of Neoforma.com, he took the company public. It now boasts a hefty $3.3 billion market capitalization . . .

Forbes Magazine, March 28, 2000
Neoforma.com to Acquire Eclipsys
Neoforma.com Inc., operator of an online medical marketplace, agreed to acquire Eclipsys Corp., a healthcare software and services provider, and a related company for stock totaling $2.72 billion.

Associated Press, March 30, 2000
Over dinner one evening, I glanced up from my plate, assumed an air of casualness, and said to Anni, “We made twenty million dollars today.”

I just had to say it, once...

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February 2000 - Fame

2/19/2015

 
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What the Heck is Healtheon?
Jim Clark set out to build an Internet start-up that would revolutionize healthcare . . . Clark, never one to admit mistakes easily, concedes his vision was perhaps “a bit” too big and the industry more resistant to change than he had imagined . . .

Fortune, February 21, 2000
I was lost in the place between external validation and internal detachment. Between elation and dread...

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January 2000 - The Premier - Part 3

2/18/2015

 
More bumps to drive our paranoia ahead of the IPO...

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January 2000 - The Premiere - Part 2

2/17/2015

 

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January 2000 - The Premiere - Part 1

2/16/2015

 
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IPO
Market close on day of Neoforma IPO at NASDAQ headquarters on New York’s Times Square. From left: Chris Bing, Wayne McVicker, Fred Ruegsegger, Bob Zollars, Jeff Kleck, Kali Coffman & Amanda Mogin. Photo: Alan Perlman
Neoforma.com IPO Takes Off
While many stocks were sold off on Monday, the initial public offering of Neoforma.com (NASDAQ: NEOF) performed like a typical high-flying, shot-from-a-cannon, business-to-business IPO . . .

E-Commerce Times, January 25, 2000
I was sitting in my office, futilely trying to focus on the business unit plan I was editing, when Stephen—who had a tendency to boast about the important, successful people he knew—walked into my office, sat down in a chair, leaned forward and said, “Hey! I just realized that, in a few weeks, you’ll be the richest person I have ever known!”

What an odd thing to hear someone say!...

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December 1999 - Starving Artist

2/13/2015

 
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Top Five Deals in October - Neoforma.com $70.5 million
. . . One of those business-to-business ventures only its customers ever hear about, Neoforma.com is an online marketplace for medical supplies. What’s a real business doing on this list? . . .

Fortune Magazine, December 1999
Tenet, Columbia start Internet ventures
. . . Eager not to miss the dotcom train, Columbia/HCA Healthcare Corp. and Tenet Healthcare Corp., the nation’s two largest for-profit hospital companies, separately launched e-commerce procurement companies last week . . .

Modern Healthcare, December 20-27, 1999
Reality was increasingly out of sync.

In spite of many setbacks in getting the IPO documents filed, our advisors still felt that there was a chance we could host our public offering sometime in early December. 

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November 1999 - Compatriots

2/12/2015

 
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VerticalNet and Neoforma.com Announce Exclusive Multi-year E-commerce Agreement
VerticalNet, Inc. the Internet’s premier portfolio of business-to-business vertical trading communities and First Mover in the space, today announced a strategic alliance with Neoforma.com, Inc., a leading provider of B2B e-commerce services in the market for medical products, supplies and equipment . . .

Neoforma Press Release, November 22, 1999
I hadn’t exactly expected to metaphorically run toward each other in slow motion, arms outstretched, through a field of flowers on a sunny day. I just thought that we had been watching each other fondly from afar for so long that something slightly magical might happen between us when we first met...

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September 1999 - The Ramp - Part 3

2/11/2015

 
More fun pre-IPO drama...

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September 1999 - The Ramp - Part 2

2/10/2015

 
More about the absolutely crazy pre-IPO frenzy. Things get rather nasty...

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September 1999 - The Ramp - Part 1

2/9/2015

 
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. . . Of the two start-ups [Neoforma and Medibuy], Neoforma has the more technically sophisticated website . . . Neoforma seems to have better technology and stronger managers than its rival . . .

Forbes Magazine, September 1999
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Money brought everything to the surface.

Everything had been set up. The pieces were falling into place. The press was talking about us. Investors were buzzing about us. Wall Street was in a frenzy of excitement. Money was breeding money, and its offspring were fertile at birth...

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August 1999 - Pick-ups

2/6/2015

 
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Neoforma.com, Inc. Acquires General Asset Recovery, LLC
B-2-B Services to Include Live Auction, Internet Auction, Classifieds and More. Neoforma.com, Inc., the global healthcare marketplace, announced today that it has acquired Arlington Heights, Illinois–based healthcare auction company General Asset Recovery, LLC (GAR) . . .

Neoforma Press Release, August 17, 1999
eBusiness and the Supply Chain
Are you at risk of being “Amazoned?” Depending on who you talk to, it’s more a probability than a possibility . . . Can a fledgling dotcom company really swoop into health care and “re-intermediate,” as Amazon.com has done in the publishing industry? . . . “Any GPO or distributor that signs a contract with an e-commerce company will have just signed its own death warrant,” says one GPO executive . . .

The Health Strategist, August, 1999
Land Grab
It’s funny to think of eBay and Amazon.com as the dinosaurs of the Internet. But it’s becoming clearer that the Web’s real promise lies not so much in auctions and consumer sales, but in the exploding business-to-business market . . .

Forbes, August 23, 1999
A company’s ultimate product is its culture.

Whenever we saw a gap in our organization, Bob, Jeff, some other manager or I would meet with others to discuss the need...

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    About Me

    I am an architect, writer, and serial entrepreneur. 

    I'm also a dichromatic tritan, which means I'm one of between 150 and 1,500 people in the US with this rather extreme form of colorblindness. I write about how colorblindness has profoundly affected my life's path on my other blog: dichromat.com

    My surreal journey as co-founder of Neoforma (formally NASDAQ: NEOF, later acquired by GHX) is the basis for Starting Something, a multiple award-winning book, used in many biz school entrepreneurship classes:

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