Voices of Healthcare · #8
Jeff Tangney
Co-founder and CEO
Doximity
Jeff Tangney is co-founder and chief executive of Doximity, the professional network most U.S. physicians use to message colleagues, find jobs, and read clinical news. He co-founded Epocrates, left it burned out after a failed public offering, and built Doximity slowly and profitably against the usual Silicon Valley advice.
Building a Drug App for the Palm Pilot
After a bachelor's degree in economics and mathematics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he was a healthcare investment analyst at Goldman Sachs. In the late 1990s, sharing an apartment in New York City with physician Richard Fiedotin, he worked on an app so a doctor could look up drug information on a Palm Pilot. They took the idea to the Stanford Graduate School of Business, met physician Tom Lee on a student climbing trip, and in 1998 started what became Epocrates.
Leaving Epocrates
Epocrates raised about $40 million, then cut jobs in 2002 after the tech crash. Tangney tried to take it public, withdrew the prospectus during the 2008 financial crisis, and left in late 2009. "There was a point during the last couple years of my tenure where it felt like we were in this tunnel, marching toward a goal," he said. "I wasn't having as much fun."
Founding Doximity
He started Doximity in 2010 with Shari Buck, a former Epocrates colleague, and Nate Gross, a physician who had co-founded Rock Health. "We would meet in a workspace above the garage. We used to laugh at how Apple it was," he recalled. The service became a secure channel among clinicians and patients, a job board for health systems, and a place drugmakers pay to reach a specific specialty.
He grew it deliberately. "I did resist some of the Silicon Valley wisdom of, you need to go big, you need to hire 40 more sales people and do all these things," he said. Doximity's last outside round was in 2014, and it listed on the New York Stock Exchange on June 24, 2021, setting aside up to 3.5 million shares for doctors who used Doximity.
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