Alex Konrad(@alexrkonrad):"The first big boss we had to go after, and compete against, was Microsoft." - @AbridgeHQ CEO Shiv Rao (@ShivdevRao) In healthcare, nobody's ever been fired for buying Microsoft. And VCs usually tell startups to prove themselves with small customers first. Not Abridge. 75% of doctors in the U.S. practice in big health systems. "To build a big, impactful, legacy-leaving, generational company, you need to get there as fast as you can," Rao says. So Abridge made the "YOLO move" as a 50-person startup to go after Microsoft head-to-head. "If it didn't work out for us with these first couple systems, we would've been dead." Watch the full interview on The Upstarts Podcast, presented by @Rippling.

2026.07.27 17:50

"The first big boss we had to go after, and compete against, was Microsoft." - @AbridgeHQ CEO Shiv Rao (@ShivdevRao) In healthcare, nobody's ever been fired for buying Microsoft. And VCs usually tell startups to prove themselves with small customers first. Not Abridge. 75% of doctors in the U.S. practice in big health systems. "To build a big, impactful, legacy-leaving, generational company, you need to get there as fast as you can," Rao says. So Abridge made the "YOLO move" as a 50-person startup to go after Microsoft head-to-head. "If it didn't work out for us with these first couple systems, we would've been dead." Watch the full interview on The Upstarts Podcast, presented by @Rippling.