Corporate Independence: Adamantly believes that to best serve customers, a company must remain private, avoiding public markets, venture capital, and private equity.
Legacy Through Structure: Is convinced that a company's founding mission can be preserved indefinitely through legal structures like a Purpose Trust that hard-codes core principles.
Organic Innovation: Holds that superior products are built through consistent, high-investment internal R&D rather than by acquiring other companies and technologies.
Patient Care Over Profit: Views healthcare as a field where patient outcomes should be the primary focus, leading to skepticism of purely profit-driven entities like PE-backed roll-ups.
Employee-Centric Philanthropy: Distributes personal wealth to employees by annually transferring stock to her foundation, which then sells it back to the company for employee distribution.
1979
Founded Epic Systems, beginning a multi-decade journey of bootstrapping the company without venture capital or private equity funding.
Post-HITECH Act
Argued against a provision in the HITECH Act that required physicians to personally enter data into EHRs, a policy debate she ultimately lost.
2016
Experienced a significant software failure in her personal Tesla, where the Autodrive feature malfunctioned and steered into oncoming traffic.
Present
Is actively implementing a succession plan centered on a Purpose Trust, designed to legally ensure Epic Systems remains private and adheres to its founding principles indefinitely.
▶Unyielding Corporate IndependenceMay 2026
Faulkner has architected Epic Systems to perpetually resist outside financial influence. This is demonstrated by her refusal to take on venture capital or private equity, a core company principle of never going public, and a prohibition on being acquired.
This model provides Epic with extreme long-term strategic stability and a focus on product over shareholder returns, but it may limit access to capital markets and the potential for hyper-growth seen in publicly-traded or VC-backed competitors.
▶Legacy and Mission Preservation via a Purpose TrustMay 2026
Faulkner's succession plan involves placing her voting stock into a Purpose Trust controlled by family and staff. This legal structure is designed to be permanent and is bound by rules that prevent trustees from ever taking the company public or selling it, ensuring its founding principles are maintained.
This novel governance structure serves as a key case study for founders who prioritize a company's mission and culture over a lucrative exit, offering a viable alternative to acquisition or an IPO for preserving a legacy.
▶Growth Through Organic InnovationMay 2026
Epic Systems prioritizes internal product development over growth through acquisition, dedicating 30-35% of its revenue to R&D. This focus has led to features like 'Best care choices for my patient' and a market-leading number of APIs, all built in-house.
The strategy suggests a belief that organic, deeply-integrated innovation creates a more sustainable competitive advantage and better product than bolting on acquired technologies, even if it represents a slower path to expanding capabilities.
▶Principled Stance on Healthcare CommercializationMay 2026
Faulkner expresses a clear preference for working with healthcare organizations that prioritize patient care over profit, showing hesitancy towards private equity-backed roll-ups. This principle-based approach is also reflected in her advocacy on healthcare policy, such as the HITECH Act.
Positioning Epic as a stakeholder with a distinct ideology on healthcare delivery serves as a powerful brand differentiator but may also create friction with increasingly commercial segments of the market, potentially limiting its addressable market.