Rejecting Silicon Valley, the CEO of Doximity built a multi-billion dollar company.

Doximity co-founder and CEO Jeff Tangney now owns $2.9 billion in shares after the company went public on the New York Stock Exchange.

According to CNBC, before his success with Doximity, founder Jeff Tangney, at the age of 48, started the medical technology company Epocrates. However, Epocrates ended up after a disappointing acquisition for less than $300 million.

By 2010, when he decided to rebuild his medical technology with Doximity, Mr. Tangney had learned to not raise too much capital and focus more on the medical team.

Accordingly, Doximity was created as a secure way for medical professionals to communicate and share information with their colleagues and patients. Doximity also has an online service and has served more than 63 million visits during the pandemic. Currently, there are 1.8 million Doximity users in the US, of which 80% are medical staff.

Despite never appearing on the list of billion-dollar tech unicorns, Doximity successfully launched on the New York Stock Exchange on June 24, with a total market capitalization of nearly $10 billion after raising about $500 million in its IPO.

Doximity generates revenue from drug manufacturers, who use the site to market treatments to special audiences, and health systems looking to promote content to doctors in countries around the world. It is also a recruitment tool that hospitals and medical centers use to recruit talented doctors.

The founder of Tangney insists that Doximity can only expand as quickly as the customer's budget allows. Therefore, the company does not aim to grow at "rocket speed" and this is also the reason Mr. Tangney "rejected" Silicon Valley.

Reportedly, Mr. Tangney also doesn't pour money into the company's branding, another reason Doximity is mostly unknown in Silicon Valley despite having its headquarters in San Francisco.

Accordingly, Doximity's total advertising budget for the previous fiscal year was $2.6 million. This amount is only close to what Uber spends on average a day. Even so, Doximity had over $200 million in revenue last fiscal year and generated more than $50 million in net income.

For Mr. Tangney, product development at Doximity has always been focused on what the doctor needs. “Physicians are sort of outsiders in the financial markets and business world,” Tangney said. “Yet in our life and world they’re the insiders, they’re the people we care about most. We’d rather the shares go to them if there’s a pop than to some hedge fund somewhere.”

Accordingly, after the successful IPO, the share price of Doximity increased by 115% in the first two days. The value of shares owned by the company's doctors also increased from $91 million to more than $195 million. Founder Jeff Tangney himself currently owns shares worth $2.9 billion.