Bren:Alumni

The Bren School Alumni Chapter is proud of our alumni, and we are pleased to showcase their activities in these “Alumni Spotlights”. To suggest a spotlight please contact Eric Kowalik.

David Cheng, ‘90, an avid scuba diver, shares his passion for UCI with the creatures of the sea, flashing them the Rip ‘Em Eaters hand sign. Cheng founded Accenx, a leading provider of health information exchange and interoperability solutions in 1997.

David Cheng, always wanted to be a businessman.

“My father told me the world is built by engineers, but run by businessmen,” Cheng a 1990 alumnus of the Bren School said.

In 1997, Cheng saw his opportunity and founded Accenx, a leading provider of health information exchange and interoperability solutions, with more than 150 customers and the largest dedicated team of integration specialists in the industry.

The company’s solutions allow hospitals, physician practices, and other participants in the healthcare community to quickly connect, and seamlessly share information, to improve patient care, reduce administrative costs, and create a high-quality experience for both patients and providers.

“I saw a need to provide information to physicians, we were ahead of our time, got a lot of support from health care vendors and got some great accounts around the country including the Cleveland Clinic one of the top health care organizations in the nation,” Cheng said.

With the recent passage of the economic stimulus plan that includes an emphasis on improving health care technology, Cheng and his company are excited to apply what they have developed over the past 11 years into a larger market.

“We want to provide better care for the patient, cut down on costs, and ultimately save lives.” Cheng said.

Cheng’s day is full of meetings and keeping an eye on cash flow, but it is as exciting as riding a roller coaster.

“Everyday you are going to get some great news, some good news and some bad news,” Cheng said. “Some days you feel like you are at the top of the ride, then the next thing you know you come careening down and feel like the car is going to fall off the track and you are going to land face first.”

Cheng is the first to admit that the roller coaster ride of entrepreneurship is not for everybody.

“You have to have the heart for it, you have to have the stomach for it and you have to have the passion for it,” Cheng said. “Successful entrepreneurs are the ones who can communicate their passion to their customers, prospects and employees. People buy from people and the first thing you always sell is yourself. You may have the best technology, but if people don’t trust you or believe you can get the job done, they won’t buy from you.”

BACK TO BASIC

Cheng got his introduction to technology in 8th grade, after they ran out of math classes for him to take.

The school had recently purchased a TRS 80 and the math teacher asked Cheng to play around with it so he learned BASIC and programmed a pong game.

“So in 1981, I got the opportunity to write my first BASIC program, that was a time when most people hadn’t even heard of computers,” Cheng said. “I got really excited about it and have been playing with computers since.”

Cheng credits his degree from the Bren School with providing him the ability to understand both the technology and business aspect of a company.

“The information aspect of information and computer sciences was very interesting to me and it allowed me to see the business aspect of the technology which is what I was also interested in,” Cheng said.

While at junior college where he was trying to figure out what he wanted to do, Cheng heard about the computer science program at UCI and was also impressed with what a friend of his who went through the program had learned.

“I looked at the ICS curriculum and saw a lot of classes that taught students about the real life applications of the technology, not just the theory behind them and how to write them,” Cheng said.

The mixture of classes allowed Cheng to dive deep into the technical side, like the class in which he wrote his own operating system, but also provided him a glimpse at life in the real world, like in ICS 125, a class that required Cheng to work in a team with a real world client on a business application.

“You learned theories and the application of those theories, but the assignments were made to mimic real world work and it was left up to us to figure out how to apply what we learned to solve the problem in the assignment,” Cheng said.

One of Cheng’s fondest memories was having “parties” in the lab, where he and his fellow classmates would gather in the lab at midnight with snacks and sodas, occupy a corner of the lab, pull the workstations together to make a jury rigged multi-window environment and between jokes, worked together to finish their assignments.

“I meet a lot of really quality people during my time at ICS, and I still keep in touch with many if them, in fact one of them works with me today,” Cheng said.

The program’s reputation in the business community also provided Cheng a plethora of internship and part-time job opportunities that honed his skills and prepared him well for a job in the real world.

“My first job out of UCI was working for Xerox in a five-member team to develop an operating system,” Cheng said. “It was like ICS 125 all over again, so it wasn’t a tough transition to the real world.”

UNDERWATER

Cheng admits he hasn’t achieved a work life balance yet, but is trying his best.

“I’m not there yet,” Cheng said. “My life is full of work, but I do a lot of things to take my mind off work and spend time with my family. I do martial arts with my kids, I scuba dive and build model airplanes.”

Cheng likes scuba diving because it gets him away from everything. As soon as he goes underwater, everything disappears and he is in another world, a world that occasional provides enlightening anecdotes.

While exploring two navy wrecks with a dive group in Hawaii, Cheng almost got run over by the Atlantis submarine tour. As he frantically swam out of the path of the submarine, he saw a plethora of flash bulbs as tourists snapped pictures.

“I should be in some people’s vacation photos and I’m sure they wrote next to it, this is the idiot that almost got ran over by the submarine.” Cheng said with a laugh.