|
|
|
|
One afternoon last May, Jeffrey Arnold, the CEO of WebMD, found
himself standing before a room of Intel executives. He'd been invited to
the company's headquarters in Santa Clara to talk about doing business on
the Internet. Sitting raptly in the front row were Intel Chairman Andy Grove,
founder (and semiconductor legend) Gordon Moore, and CEO Craig Barrett. Filling
out the room were other top executives from Intel's offices around the world--all
there to listen to Arnold, a 29-year-old entrepreneur from Atlanta who never
graduated from college. Jeff Arnold is an Internet fairy tale if there
ever was one. Arnold has become, in less than one year, one of the most powerful
players, if not the most powerful, in Internet health care. The startup he
founded is now valued at $3.5 billion, thanks to its merger with Healtheon.
He got Microsoft to invest more than $250 million in WebMD and to agree to
make WebMD its only partner for online health care. Two months earlier he'd
gotten CNN to co-brand health news segments to appear both on CNN and at
WebMD's Website, for which the network has committed healthy amounts of on-air
promotion. Arnold has raised over $500 million in private capital for WebMD
and done deals that guarantee the company another $500 million in revenue
over the next five years. The guy had long meetings with Michael Dell and
Microsoft president Steve Ballmer, and acquired ueber-VC John Doerr as a
huge fan. He's even managed to get warring companies to agree to coexist
on WebMD's site--rival portal sites Lycos and Excite have both named WebMD
as their exclusive health-care partner. Just about everything on the site
today is from another company. Its content is from Medcast Networks, an Atlanta
medical news company that WebMD acquired in July. Its disease discussion
groups come from Sapient Health Network, a Portland, Ore., organization acquired
in January. The medical staffing service comes from a deal with J&C
Nationwide, and the physician transcription services are from a deal with
MedQuist. Arnold had gathered so many other partners--Dell, Microsoft, CNN,
McKesson, and Du Pont, to name some of the biggies. The merger turned Arnold
into a megamillionaire, now worth $321 million, but he prefers to regard
the sum as akin to monopoly money. |
|