Jeff Arnold
Jeff Arnold is an influential entrepreneur renowned for founding WebMD, a highly visited online resource for medical information. Born on December 30, 1969, in Dallas, Texas, he grew up in Georgia and initially pursued a career in pharmaceutical sales after dropping out of college. In 1994, he launched Quality Diagnostic Services, which became a successful cardiac monitoring company, eventually selling it to Matria Healthcare for $2.5 million. With these funds, Arnold established WebMD, which gained significant investment from major corporations like Microsoft and DuPont, quickly ascending in value.
Arnold's strategy involved acquiring competitors and integrating them into WebMD to enhance its offerings, including partnerships with established healthcare providers. Despite facing challenges with profitability and investor concerns during the dot-com crash, he continued to innovate, later founding other successful platforms such as HowStuffWorks and Sharecare.com. His work emphasizes making medical information accessible while navigating the complexities of internet privacy and content reliability. As of late 2023, Arnold transitioned from CEO to executive chair of Sharecare.com, having built a notable legacy in digital health information.
Subject Terms
Jeff Arnold
Founder of WebMD
- Born: December 30, 1969
- Place of Birth: Dallas, Texas
Primary Company/Organization: WebMD
Introduction
Jeff Arnold engineered his knowledge of marketing medical equipment into creating the website WebMD, which became one of the Internet's most often visited sites for medical information. Arnold operated on the principle of buying out competitors and making them part of his team. Arnold's goal for WebMD was to make it the link among the different facets of the medical industry, providing consumer access to doctors, pharmacists, drug companies, and insurance companies. After leaving WebMD, Arnold helped found other successful websites, including HowStuffWorks, LidRock, and Sharecare.com. He has continued to demonstrate a unique ability to develop ideas, persuade investors of their profitability, and deliver on his promises. In 1999, Fortunenamed him as one of the richest Americans under the age of forty.
Early Life
Jeffrey T. Arnold was born in Dallas, Texas, on December 30, 1969, into a middle-class family; he is one of five children. The family moved to Georgia when Arnold was still a child, and he was raised there. He met his future wife, Meg Nichols, who lived in the Atlanta area, when they were both students at the University of Georgia in Athens. In 1983, while majoring in speech communications, he dropped out of school to work as a pharmaceutical salesman. He told relatives that he planned to be a billionaire by the time he was thirty.
In 1994, at the age of twenty-four, with a $25,000 investment from his wife's family, Jeff and Meg Arnold founded Quality Diagnostic Services (QDS), a company that gathered data from heart monitors. The Arnolds both worked from their apartment, manning a toll-free telephone line and using a fax machine to submit patient data to physicians. Under Arnold's guidance, QDS grew into one of the most profitable cardiac arrhythmia monitoring companies in the United States.
In 1998, Arnold sold QDS to Matria Healthcare, also based in Atlanta, for $2.5 million. He used that money to found WebMD. Even with limited credentials, Arnold was able to persuade high-profile partners to invest in his new site. He talked Microsoft into investing $250 million, DuPont into investing $220 million, and News Corporation into investing $100 million (which gave that company 11 percent of WebMD's stock). Within a year, WebMD's value had reached $20 billion.
Life's Work
Arnold's formula in founding WebMD was to entice consumers searching for Internet-based health information to the site to buy health-related products from WebMD's partners. Arnold believed that the site could ultimately be used by patients making doctors' appointments, filling prescriptions, and ordering lab tests online. However, physicians were initially dubious about trusting sensitive information to the Internet and were reluctant to fall in line.
The success of WebMD derived instead from Arnold's skill in signing up companies with established reputations to align themselves with the site. He convinced the drugstore chain CVS to sign on as the official pharmacy for the site. Humana, a health care provider, also signed on with the goal of making drug information available to all of a patient's doctors, thereby cutting down on chances of dangerous drug interactions. From the beginning, WebMD was designed to be user-friendly, providing for search by either keywords or questions. Users were also able to identify possible health conditions by using a symptom checker. Separate sections of the site were devoted to issues such as health news, drugs, wellness, parenting, teens, and pets.
In November 1999, Arnold bought out WebMD's chief rival, Healtheon, and the company became Healtheon/WebMD. Healtheon, which was later dropped from the company name, had been founded by Jim Clark, a Silicon Valley engineer, who was convinced that he could create the perfect method for automating health care activities. In February 14, 2000, Arnold expanded the company further by acquiring CareInsite and its parent company, Medical Manager Corporation (MMC), for a reported $5.4 billion in stocks. MMC was the chief management software provider for 185,000 physicians, On February 16, for a price of $312 million, Arnold added OnHealth Network to WebMD's expanded holdings. Because OnHealth placed an emphasis on wellness, it added a new element to WebMD, which was more focused on identifying diseases and their treatments. The new acquisitions placed WebMD in a position to move from third place to first place among Internet health sites. Despite this, WebMD was not showing a profit, and critics continued to raise concerns about privacy rights and content reliability.
In 2000, Arnold announced that he had negotiated a billion-dollar deal with Rupert Murdoch for WebMD to provide health-related information to Fox and other Murdoch enterprises. However, investors were becoming concerned that Arnold had taken on too much too fast. As stock in dot-coms plummeted, WebMD stock dropped from $70 per share to $10 per share. Arnold resigned from the company, salvaging $100 million of his personal fortune by selling off his company stock.
In 1998, Marshall Brain had created HowStuffWorks as an online encyclopedia to explain the rationale behind the workings of everything from lightbulbs to hybrid automobiles. Arnold invested in HowStuffWorks in 2001 and purchased the American portion of the company via his investment company, Convex Group, in 2002 for $2 million. He subsequently launched an investment campaign that generated close to $1 million. With Arnold as chief executive officer (CEO), the site continued to gain in popularity. In May 2007, it drew 1.5 million unique visitors and had climbed to 10.5 million by the end of the year. Arnold sold HowStuffWorks to Discovery in 2007 for $250 million, and Discovery Channel launched a HowStuffWorks television program the following summer. Arnold continued to serve as chief digital architect of HowStuffWorks' Curiosity Project (curiosity.com) until the end of 2011.
In January 2001, in a partnership with Eric Gleacher, Arnold established the Convex Group, which John Helyar of Fortune described as “a combination turbo charged vulture fund and souped-up web-navigation delivery engine.” Arnold manages his own investments through the Convex Group, which also claims investors such as Time Warner and Cox Communications. The search engine was designed chiefly for use by advertisers.
In January 2003, Jeff Arnold founded LidRock as a means of selling CDs by artists such as Britney Spears, Black Eyed Peas, Ashanti, Jessica Simpson, and Elvis Presley. The CDs were packaged in the lids of soft drinks sold at fast-food stores, theme parks, and movie theaters. He managed to sign up Universal Studios, NASCAR, and the BP convenience stores chain as a way of reaching teenagers, his target audience. Within a year, LidRock had sold 10 million CDs. In May 2004, LidRock added full-length movies to the line. For a cost of $4, users could play purchased movies for up to sixty hours after they were removed from lids.
By the fall of 2010, Jeff Arnold was back in the business of providing medical information via the Internet as chairman and CEO of Sharecare.com, an interactive website that is able to answer more than a million health-related questions. Other interactive features include the ability to set up user pages on the site and to become “friends” with physicians connected to the site, which gives users added access to ongoing health news and information. The success of the project was virtually assured through affiliations with media giants that included Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Studios, the Oprah Winfrey Network, HSW International, Sony, and Discovery. Winfrey's protégé Dr. Mehmet Oz, a cardiac surgeon and the host of the Dr. Oz Show, was recruited, and Arnold also signed up a huge roster of hospitals, physicians, and other health care professionals, including the Cleveland Clinic, Johns Hopkins Hospital, and New York–Presbyterian Hospital. Other partners included organizations ranging from the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) and the American Red Cross to the American Diabetes Association and the American Heart Association.
Arnold's critics have challenged the wisdom of having partners such as Colgate-Palmolive, Pfizer, Johnson and Johnson, and Walgreens as paid affiliates on Sharecare.com. Arnold has responded to the criticism by citing data indicating that brand answers are accessed just as often as those provided by medical experts. In January 2012, Sharecare.com purchased the rights to The Little Blue Book, a major reference tool for physicians. The company went public in 2021. At the time, it had more than $400 million in sales and 2,400 employees throughout the world. In late 2023, Arnold stepped down as CEO of Sharecare.com but remained with the company as executive chair.
Arnold also owns the star rating service and travel guide series Forbes Travel Guide (formerly Mobil Travel Guide), which he licensed to Forbes in 2009 and for which he serves as chairman.
Personal Life
Arnold is marred with four children. In 1998, Arnold's newfound success allowed him to purchase a home in Buckhead, an upscale area of Atlanta, for $4 million. The mansion, previously owned by Prince Faisal of Saudi Arabia, had also been used in publicity shots for Gone with the Wind (1939). When the house was destroyed by fire in October 2000, Arnold rebuilt it on the same site. Arnold also enjoys lavish entertaining in both the private and professional realms. In 2000, he hired Elton John, who also has a home in the Atlanta area, to provide entertainment for a Super Bowl party. When trying to convince Microsoft to invest in WebMD, Arnold flew an entire team from Seattle to the Masters Golf Tournament in Augusta, Georgia. After the merger with Healtheon, he took five friends to golf school.
Bibliography
Burke, Monte. “Pop Music.” Forbes 173.1 (2004): n. pag. Forbes.com. Web. 1 May 2012.
Carrns, Ann. “Young Atlantan Makes Billions with WebMD.” Wall Street Journal 21 May 1999. Print.
Elliott, Stuart. “Web Site to Offer Health Advice, Some of It from Marketers.” New York Times 7 Oct. 2010. Print.
Helyar, John. “Jeff Arnold, Founder of WebMD, Could Be the Poster Boy for the Internet Bubble.” Fortune 5 Mar. 2001. Web. CNN.com. 1 May 2012.
Moukheiber, Zina. “WebMD Founder Jeff Arnold Stages Comeback with New Health Site.” Forbes 22 Oct. 2010. Web. Forbes.com. 1 May 2012.
Pack, Thomas. “Sharecare: Getting a Healthy Prognosis.” Information Today 28.1 (2011): n. pag. Print.
Saporta, Maria. "Moment: Sharecare Going Public, Boosting Atlanta's Well-Being." Saporta Report, 29 June 2021, saportareport.com/jeff-arnolds-shining-moment-sharecare-going-public-boosting-atlantas-well-being/sections/reports/maria‗saporta/. Accessed 6 Mar. 2024.
Sherrid, Pamela. “The Microsoft of Medical Web Sites.” U.S. News and World Report 128.8 28 Feb. 2000. Print.
Stelter, Brian. “Online Encyclopedia Gets New Push from Discovery.” New York Times 30 June 2008. Print.
Warner, Melanie. “The Young and the Loaded.” Fortune 140.6 (1999): n. pag. CNN.com. Web. 1 May 2012.