Finding Leaders for Internet Health Care

Yowe: I have the opportunity to lead a great group of professionals in the executive search business who are primarily engaged in ebusiness-oriented search activities. One of the biggest challenges that we have faced over the past year is that the demand for our services has just been unbelievable. All professional-services providers (including investment bankers, attorneys, and accountants) have had more business in the past year than they could possibly handle. The major challenge for leadership is really quality: how do you deliver the services that you were hired to perform, and have done well so many times before, when there is so much work out there? How do you distinguish between a really good ebusiness opportunity and compost-heap.com? A search that you should not have undertaken can keep you from doing the best possible job for your good clients. We have learned a lot, after much experience of what is good and what is not. We see the market in a major transition now that we think is going to be good for the industry overall.

Givens: Certainly, the Internet has had a profound impact on the way I conduct my everyday life. We finance more companies more quickly than we have in the past, and the criteria for success have changed dramatically. These criteria focus much more on time to market, which is very much dependent, these days, on being able to finance your company (as well as to build management teams quite quickly). I would say that most venture capitalists spend much more time today than even a year ago on recruiting matters. We get involved, and that is what really keeps us awake at night, more than anything else. It is management teams, after all, that are able to bob and weave in a very competitive environment and also able to attract the kind of capital that companies need in order to accelerate their business plans.

Graham: As the CEO of a hospital, I am probably representing the smokestack side of this industry. We became involved in ehealth primarily because we wanted to serve our high-tech neighborhood, which includes the Microsoft Corp. It was a defensive strategy for us. We created Overlake Venture Center to try to retain the intellectual capital of our physicians and nurses, much as a number of universities have created technology-transfer centers to keep their highly skilled, smart people on duty. One of the busiest cardiologists that we have at the hospital retired this year because he had invested in a successful Internet company; we lost him at age 51 to another industry.