Bob Cramer's Blog

Last week I completed the sale of my first company, A.D.A.M., Inc. to Ebix, Inc., in a transaction valued at over $90 million.  In Atlanta, it was a very quiet event as A.D.A.M. passed to new ownership.  We are most proud to be part of the Ebix team.  Robin and his colleagues have built a very impressive business, and the company is starting to get a strong following on Wall Street.  We hope that A.D.A.M., its products, the people that remain with the company, will continue to add great value in the years ahead.  Robin certainly recognized a strong and up and coming business and he took all the right steps to bring it into the Ebix family.  I know he will be a good steward of the assets we built at A.D.A.M., and I am excited to be a shareholder in his exciting company.

A.D.A.M. was started in 1990 by myself, Greg Swayne and John McClaugherty, with the close help of Ken Lipscomb and Dan Backus.  It really represented one of Atlanta’s first true technology companies.   The company’s claim to fame back then were the massive illustrations that we created of every single structure of the human body.  At first we did them by hand, and then eventually used Mac’s to create a full illustrated human body.   Viewable from all four sides, with different male and female version and different ethnic origins, the A.D.A.M. Dissectible Anatomy product was the coolest thing going.  People were totally captivated to see the inner working of the body, in full color, with pixel level recognition being able to name every single structure to the level required by a medical school student, and fully dissectible.  Some layers were over 100 structures deep.  It was an amazing combination of medical illustration innovation and desktop publishing technology, all taking advantage of the storage capacity of CD-ROM’s. 

The journey was quite a wild one.  It predated the Internet and then we found ourselves right in the middle of the Internet.  Along the way, we helped Jeff Arnold start WebMD also in Atlanta.  We also formed strong partnership with many different players, but the Addison Wesley Publishing company (now Pearson Publishing) was a key strategic partner for many years.  Over time we branched into consumer health information and became one of if not the largest provider of consumer health information in the world.  Thanks to a key minor acquisition that I made from the Mosby Publishing Company, we transformed A.D.A.M. into this awesome library of text based health content (the A.D.A.M. Medical Encyclopedia) combined with our awesome illustrations, animations, and an ever growing amount of content.  

We had many great people work at A.D.A.M. over the years.  I am proud to say that many of them have gone on to be entrepreneurs on their own or work in the technology field.  It was a great privilege to work with so many talented folks and in our small ways, we helped put Atlanta on the map as a technology hub.  A.D.A.M. went public in 1995 and had a crazy ride, with our stock price once reaching $0.25 and then reaching $40, and everthing in between. 

At the end, we built a highly profitable, recurring revenue business that makes us very proud.  Our customers are some of the finest medical institutions in the world.  Millions of people are making important health decisions based on our information.  Our brand, A.D.A.M., stand for something important.   I loved the phrase: A.D.A.M., the first name in health information.  It worked on so many levels.  I think I stole it from the people at PriceWaterhouseCoopers, the biggest name in accounting. 

I could go on and on.  I had a lot of fun a few years back talking to the A.D.A.M. employees about the company’s history, the A.D.A.M. and Eve models that we had once at the Consumer Electronics show, the laughs and hard work and accomplishments that we acheived.  A.D.A.M. was a great Atlanta success story.  While maybe not the biggest, we did well by doing good and I think did admirably for our investors, our customers, our community and our employees.   With that, I wish my old friend, A.D.A.M., well.  I don’t know if an illustrated human body can shed a tear, but it sure can bring a smile and a great sense of wonder to the likes of many.