From zero onward
Yesterday was my first day at Teladoc — the global leader in telehealth. But today is the end of my 6-year startup journey as a founder and the first day of my unemployment.
Startups are hard (I’ve been part of many). Healthcare startups are even harder. Healthcare startups with no funding, no savings and a family is arguably a terrible idea. Nevertheless, that what we did with my co-founder, Alex Zoller.
What I am proud to say that despite all odds against us we were able to pull off unimaginable: from an idea to handling north of hundreds of thousands of telehealth sessions right in the middle of pandemic and to eventually joining the largest telehealth provider while riding a roller coaster.
During that journey I had an honor of working with a bunch of talented people who I admire immensely. Initially we built a remote-first team. With no central office developers were scattered around Eastern Europe while we were located in NY. Way before remote-first was a thing. We grew our team, who were like extended family and had trust in us despite that there were times we could not even pay them. Some engineers who were still in a university at the time of joining us went on to become rock-star devs.
Our relentless dedication and a blind conviction in our vision helped us win. First we beat a hundred of other startups in a competition to get a contract with a large health system outside of Seattle. It helped us secure resources to build a platform that simplifies patient intake. Then after we ran out of budget, we were among the few out of 80 that were accepted to an accelerator in Miami. That helped to extend our lifetime for 3 months. While at the accelerator we met TruClinic team. At the time they had a simple telehealth app with some customers. It was maintained only by 1 developer and no roadmap to scale it.
It was a match made in haven: they had customers and some funding, we had half-baked platform and no money left. After we merged with TruClinic, under their guidance we added telehealth option. They introduced us to the concept of a virtual room, and we expanded on that: making it highly configurable. That made our platform very flexible to integrate to most health care systems. So we were growing and improving.
One day at a healthcare conference while doing a demo, we were approached by IntouchHealth, who found value in us. We got acquired. The acquisition allowed us to scale our team, scale infrastructure, integrate with Intouch and exposed us to a lot of new customers.
Then the pandemic hit… Our platform went from 500 telehealth sessions a day to more than 20K a day in no time. I witnessed in awe how relentless effort by the talents at Intouch Health located in Minsk, Santa Barbara and in Argentina wrestled crumbling infrastructure from a complete halt. For the next weeks, everyone involved put all their strength, knowledge and expertise to the full extent to keep the system up, allowing patients connect with doctors in a safe environment thus saving lives. If you’ve seen a war room, that was it! Only distributed. Those are the real heroes. I was honored to work alongside them.
Our remote-first approach gave us an edge in managing demand while being under lockdown. Our global locations allowed us to work continuously. The real-life stress test in addition to all the optimization work done during that time, made the system work solid right through the day when Intouch became Teladoc.
Today I am rest assured that it’s in the right hands and there are people with appropriate skills who will take telehealth to the new heights especially now when it’s needed the most.
As for me, I realized I feel more comfortable navigating uncertainties. And the best time to start new journey is today, when the world is trying to figure out it’s future.
My next endeavor will not be a startup in a traditional way, but rather an experiment. I am excited to see where it will lead.
Vitaly Leokumovich