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1/ @Livongo got started as a brainstorming session at our @gcvp Palo Alto office between my awesome partner @htaneja, @GlenTullman and his longtime business partner Lee Shapiro ( @leethree) in 2013. I was fortunate to be the young person in the room back then.
2/ Glen and Lee were well known healthcare innovators and very successful serial entrepreneurs. They visited us from Chicago to receive some feedback from @htaneja and @gcvp about what's next. Glen and Lee knew Hemant from their collaboration on Humedica, a GC-incubated company.
3/ Glen and Lee had interests in education, healthcare and even some cleantech... Hemant was quite convincing as he helped them prioritize healthcare over the other two options on the table.
4/ Why? Hemant was quite convicted (and optimistic) that at last digital health could start delivering on its promise to fix the consumer healthcare experience and take some cost out of the broken U.S. healthcare system.
4/ Glen was deeply passionate personally about the diabetes consumer and was eager to use tech to improve the overall experience + outcomes. Glen and Lee of course knew very well how to market and sell healthcare IT products.
5/ When we looked into this space together it became clear that this was also a massive market opportunity as chronic diseases (in particular diabetes) accounted for a huge fraction of the US healthcare annual spend.
6/ A few sessions later, 1 acqhire and some $ from @gcvp @Livongo was born. It was headquartered since its early days in Silicon Valley, but operated as a distributed company (ahead of the curve!).
7/ Recruiting top tech talent to join a young healthcare startup in Mountain View became Hemant's full time job for some time... as Glen & Lee were getting started building the team on the go2market front and lived on a plane selling to various customers.
8/ After a lot of product improvements, hard work, plenty of good luck, many many happy customers, awesome healthcare outcomes, a bunch more VC $ raised and an IPO last summer... the pandemic hit us all...
9/ Telehealth got a massive boost... and you can read below @chrissyfarr's piece about how the story unfolded over the last few months culminating in yesterday's announcement. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/05/livongo-teladoc-deal-reached-over-months-during-coronavirus-pandemic.html @cnbc @gcvp.
