The Story of Livongo

There's a phenomenal entrepreneur from Chicago, Glenn Tillman, and this is 2012. I'm just going to tell you a little story of how the company came about. He was going to retire from his previous company, which was a public company, and essentially invest out of his family office. So I invited him to the Valley and I set up eight, I think it was eight or nine speed dating meetings with a bunch of technology founders doing healthcare in my office in Palo Alto. And at the end of the day we went to dinner and Glenn, in his typical very polite Midwesterner style, said, heman, terrific founders, but I got to tell you, none of these companies are going to work. And I actually said, exactly right. And the reason is because these companies are technology first in their culture and they actually don't understand that healthcare is not a free market and don't have empathy for the problem as well. Because these are folks that have really not been in the healthcare space. And my, the reason I did that is I was basically making the pitch to him, don't retire. Let's team up because we can culturally build something that's going to be at the intersection of technology and healthcare, a true partnership. And that is what it's going to take if we want to transform the healthcare space. And then we drew up on a whiteboard what segment we're going to go after. We decided on diabetes because it was personal to him, his son had diabetes and others. And so he has sort of seen the pain firsthand. And we from first principles decided the goal there is going to be twofold. We want to transform the consumer experience. Because if you think about the life of a diabetic, it used to be you're checking your blood glucose every day, you're writing the data points, you're constantly thinking about it in the background, and then you go see your PCP four times a year with that data to see how you're doing. Well, by the way, the reality is if you were okay that day to go see your pcp, you were probably doing that well that day. In the middle of those two visits, you might have gone to the ER because of some seizure. Because it's a real time, it needs to be real time managed as opposed to being checked on four times a year. So we decided, how about we give consumers an experience where they can disengage from the disease, not think about it all the time. And if something was trending wrong, we will be monitoring in the cloud and we'll call them so they can have their peace of mind. So that was first, which is transforming the consumer experience. The second was we did an actual early analysis and diabetes. Consumers with diabetes and other conditions cost the healthcare system about $350 billion. And we said we're take $100 billion out of this market by keeping people healthier, by assuring their health. So our healthcare thesis essentially was about how do we transform the consumer experience to make it more preemptive, but with a real commitment to shrinking the size of this market, which is very anti capitalistic. Right. When you mentioned Stripe earlier, Stripe's mission is to increase the GDP of the Internet. The mission in our health care work is to actually reduce the GDP of health care because this is a drain on society and want to reduce the cost so folks have resources for other things. So that's how we started building company and honestly taking that point of view and putting the consumer in the middle. We built something that grew as fast as any of the other businesses. We started in 2013, we ended up going public in 2019. And then last year we decided to combine Livongo with Teladoc in an 18 and a half billion dollar merger. The reason being we wanted to take the two winning platforms, put them together and build a modern virtual health system that could truly transform as a platform as opposed to these two companies competing and killing each other. So that's the brief story of Livongo.