Company leader
Ed Gaudet
Founder and CEO
Censinet
Ed Gaudet is founder and chief executive of Censinet, which health systems use to assess the security of their vendors. A technical writer turned startup marketer, he came out of a brief retirement to fix a problem he had suffered at Imprivata: every hospital sent its own security questionnaire.
Writing Manuals at His First Startup
He went to college for writing, and his first job out of school was writing manuals at a startup. Within about a year he was running all of its marketing. He held senior roles at IONA Technologies, Rational Software, and SQA, and in all he has worked at 11 startups, helping draft the public offering filings for two of them.
Bringing Imprivata into Health Care
He joined Imprivata as chief marketing officer in 2010 and wrote its thesis for going all in on health care. From 2013 to 2017 he was a business-unit general manager there and created Imprivata Cortext, a clinical messaging product. Selling into hospitals meant completing a security risk assessment for each one, and every assessment had different formats and questions.
Founding Censinet
"I was actually briefly retired, and I was acting 18, and I was starting to follow these guys around, the Grateful Dead," he said. His wife had other plans. He called a dozen or so health systems he had worked with, found the assessment problem was even bigger on their side, and built Censinet as a two-sided network where one hospital's assessment of a vendor becomes available to others.
Hosting Risk Never Sleeps
He hosts the podcast Risk Never Sleeps, its name borrowed from Neil Young's album Rust Never Sleeps, one of his favorites, and writes for the Forbes Tech Council. The show skips the technical talk and asks guests about their lives, down to which five records they would bring to a desert island.