Do not go public. Do not acquire or be acquired. Software must work.
These are the first three of the 10 commandments splashed across bathrooms and breakrooms at Epic Systems’ sprawling 1,670-acre campus in Verona, Wisconsin, just southwest of Madison.
It’s not the wackiest part of working at the health-care software giant. Once a month, most of the company’s 14,000 employees pack into an underground auditorium called Deep Space for a mandatory staff meeting, which some jokingly refer to as “work church.” Executives go over company news and objectives. They also lead a grammar lesson, such as whether it’s OK to end sentences with a preposition and when to use “who” or “whom.”
Epic’s CEO is 82-year-old Judy Faulkner, who started the company in a Wisconsin basement in 1979 and has helmed the enterprise ever since. En route to building a business with $5.7 billion in annual revenue, Faulkner has kept significant distance from her tech peers, both physically and otherwise. Epic is about 2,000 miles east of both Seattle and Silicon Valley, and the company has never taken money from venture capitalists.
“I’ve described her as a female cross between Bill Gates and Willy Wonka,” Dr. Eric Dickson, CEO of UMass Memorial Health, said in an interview. The hospital system is an Epic customer, Dickson said, adding that he’s known Faulkner for around 20 years.
