Epic founder and CEO Judy Faulkner has spent nearly five decades building the company by declining to do many of the things software companies are expected to do. The firm has never gone public, never taken venture capital or private equity money and never bought another company. It became the nation’s largest hospital EHR vendor anyway.
Several of Ms. Faulkner’s rules are now written into her estate plan, so they will bind Epic after she’s gone. Others are management habits that have held as the company grew from three part-time employees in a basement into a vendor that controls 43.7% of the U.S. acute care hospital EHR market. A few are being tested, by lawsuits over Epic’s noncompete agreements and by a year of leadership turnover that included the departure of the executive long viewed as her likely successor.
Here are nine rules she has stuck to, as reported by Becker’s:
1. Never go public.
“Do not go public” is the first of the 10 Epic commandments posted in bathrooms across the company’s 1,670-acre campus. Ms. Faulkner holds all of Epic’s voting shares, which upon her death will transfer to a trust governed by four family members and five longtime senior employees. The trust’s rules bar an initial public offering, and three health system CEOs from Epic’s CEO Council serve as “trust protectors” charged with suing anyone who doesn’t vote by them.
She traced the conviction to Epic’s earliest days during an April interview on “Freakonomics Radio.”
“I remember in the beginning of Epic looking up good companies, and reading what their shareholders wrote about those good companies,” Ms. Faulkner said. “The shareholders were only interested in return on equity, not what value the company was giving to the world, and they were vicious about the company whenever there wasn’t the return on equity that they wanted. And I thought, ‘Who wants owners who are like that?'”
2. Never acquire, be acquired or invest in another company.
The second commandment reads: “Do not acquire or be acquired.” Epic has also never invested in another company’s product.
“We have never invested in another company’s product and don’t intend to,” Ms. Faulkner wrote in a November 2022 blog post. “It would be a distraction.”
She explained the reasoning during a live interview with journalist Katie Couric at Epic’s headquarters this year.
“If you look at some of the other companies out there who do software and they acquire different products, it’s not the same as having one product,” Ms. Faulkner said. “Terminology differs, colors differ, styles differ, placement differs, coding schemes differ. So when you acquire a product, it no longer works so smoothly for your users.”
3. The next CEO must come from Epic’s developer ranks.
The trust’s rules also require that the next CEO be a long-term Epic employee and a software developer. Ms. Faulkner has long credited her programming background for Epic’s path.
“I’m a techie. And that’s the key difference,” she said in 2019. “Those guys were taught things like go public, make mergers and acquisitions. What was I taught? How to program.”
The requirement narrows the field. Sumit Rana, Epic’s president and a developer who joined the company in 1998, was widely viewed as the probable successor before he left Epic Aug. 14. The company has named four leaders to take on more — Seth Howard, Mark Lipsky, Erv Walter and Garrett Adams — but has not named a new president. Ms. Faulkner turned 83 in August and has no announced plans to retire.
4. Profit is a side effect.
On the same “Freakonomics Radio” episode, host Stephen Dubner told Ms. Faulkner: “My conclusion is you are not profit maximizing at all.” She agreed.
“Plainly, that’s a choice we make,” Ms. Faulkner said. “We have enough money as revenue to run our company and be successful. Our customers need it more than we do, and so we don’t want to misuse them. … I say you shouldn’t concentrate or focus on the revenue side, but you can’t be stupid about it.”
Epic’s revenue reached $6.7 billion in 2025, an Epic spokesperson told Becker’s.
5. No preordained budgets.
Ms. Faulkner described Epic’s approach to spending in a 2015 interview with Becker’s.
“Our philosophy with that is if you need it, buy it. And if you don’t need it, don’t buy it,” she said. “We teach people how to judge things appropriately and make the right decisions, so it isn’t chaos by any means. What we did see is that if you have budgets, people spend to their budget.”
The company was still operating without a preordained budget in 2024. That year, Ms. Faulkner said Epic spends 82% of its money on people, 8% on buildings and 10% on everything else.
6. Don’t sell software into a design you think is wrong.
In a March 2024 blog post, Ms. Faulkner recalled a visit from health system leaders who wanted a McKesson EHR for pharmacy, Cerner for nursing and Epic for documentation.
“I tapped our salesperson who was sitting next to me and whispered, ‘Why are they here?'” she wrote. “When it was our turn to speak, we said, ‘That’s an awful way to design a system and we’re sorry you traveled here, but we won’t sell our software to you.'”
“In the end, they installed our integrated system,” Ms. Faulkner wrote.
7. Hire by test, not by interview.
“Interviews mean very, very little in our type of work,” Ms. Faulkner said at Epic’s August 2024 Users Group Meeting. “We hire mainly by test.”
Epic received 370,000 job applications in the year leading up to that meeting and hired just over 2,000 people, she said. In a later blog post, she explained why she stopped trusting her own judgment in interviews.
“I used to interview people and then try to guess from the interview how well they’d do on the test,” Ms. Faulkner wrote. “I was right about 50% of the time, which is not nearly good enough. The tests were much more predictive than I was of a person’s future success at the job.”
8. Work on campus, in your own office.
Most of Epic’s Verona employees have been expected in the office five days a week since November 2021, a policy some employees pushed back on in 2023. Epic has kept adding buildings so staff can have private offices.
“The most expensive feature of the campus is not the themes — it’s that our staff have their own offices,” Ms. Faulkner wrote in an April 2025 blog post. “This pays back in spades in productivity.”
9. Hold the line on noncompetes.
This is the rule under the most legal pressure. Veeva Systems is appealing the April dismissal of its lawsuit claiming Epic’s noncompete agreements hurt its ability to recruit in Madison, Wis. A former Epic employee sued in California federal court in July, alleging the agreements violate state law. Texas sued Epic in December 2025, claiming in part that its noncompete and no-hire agreements restrict employee mobility.
Ms. Faulkner defended the agreements in her interview with Ms. Couric.
“Let’s just look at Coca-Cola, which has its own recipe, which is supposed to be secret,” she said. “If you’re the person who does the Coca-Cola mix, are you allowed to take a job to go to PepsiCo and teach them the same thing? Probably not.”
Asked by Ms. Couric whether the lawsuits stress her, Ms. Faulkner was brief.
“Hard not to be,” she said. “But not a whole lot.”
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