Teladoc

I couldn't give her a hug." But that's not actually something that psychiatrists typically do with patients.

Reddington points out that the angle of the camera in the Teladoc appointments, you can't see certain manifestations that patients may have, and that would point to them being stressed or emotionally disturbed.

He says, "Like hand-wringing." She's like, "Yeah." Were you able to see the hand-wringing when you were on telemedicine? I don't recall seeing her hands.

You recall how people sit there, and they, they do this with their leg, and their leg bounces because they're going through some type of emotional stress.

I can't have more than 7% of the money that I put into my portfolio in any one individual stock, something like that.

That's to stop me repeating a, uh, stuff I've done in the past with The Trade Desk, and way back, Teladoc, where I bought the dip too aggressively.

But yeah, companies that fall into this category are the likes of MercadoLibre and Axon, two companies I would've happily added to this month, but I've already added to enough, and now it's up to them to show me, you know, show me that it's worth me putting my money in them by, you know, continuing to perform well and hopefully the share price will follow.

There's also other companies that look impressive like New Holdings, Wise, Adyen, Airbnb, and I mean, there's quite a few on this list, but none of them are obvious buys for one reason or another.

... and I had waited and waited, and I was like, "I gotta do something about it," and I had called a couple of the places up north.

I had ca- up in Rhinelander and Minocqua, and then I had called a couple of places in Wausau, and they all had six-month waits, and the receptionist was like, "Oh, well, we can't get you in." I said, "Well, what about, like, a Teladoc?" And they were like-

Yeah

... "You gotta come in," and there's a bunch of hoops, and then I needed referrals, and the systems up there are very complex to work with, and they're not very user-friendly, especially in the event of, like, this is something I need help with right now.

Livongo has had a slow decline over time.

That is because Teladoc over the last several years has been shifting its strategy towards a kinda unified app.

So if you, like, Omada arguably should have put Teladoc on the slide for the sake of making it more apples to apples comparison, and I think Teladoc's app downloads would be doing quite well compared to anything on this slide.

Nonetheless, I think it's, it's worth noting that Livongo essentially reached zero in July 2026, which was kind of the last era's biggest digital health success in selling to employers.

And in the last three years it's like we're kinda now at its death knell, you know? Um, that's not new news for anybody who's been following the space.

Obviously Teladoc's had its, had its well-known issues.

It's had to do some write-offs, so on and so forth.

So it's not new news, but nonetheless I thought it was notable that Livongo is, um, reaching its final conclusion, I suppose, um, here in July 2026.

And that's a big problem.

So HIMSS and Teladoc, those are some of the comparables people use for healthcare companies, digital health companies.

And they're trading relatively low.

They're trading at like one to five times revenue.

And it came to me because my background, I'm actually an emergency medicine physician, but I got very interested in remote patient management technologies.

I founded a telehealth company years ago called SwiftMD around the same time as Teladoc.

It's been sold before COVID, but Teladoc goes on.

But the fact I'm interested in what can be done at home to give people information that will allow them to, frankly, not forget about the Teladoc model.

This device is smart in almost every doctor in the world, every problem that you might possibly have.

And ideally, of course, this would be the way in which most people would access health care.

Yeah, this is an incredible story.

So because of ChachiBT Healthcare book came out, I crossed paths with Michael Gorton, the founder of Teladoc, telemedicine, and we hit it off great.

We became best friends.

We started hanging.

Oftentimes, liquidity will come in clumps based on market dynamics, oftentimes public market dynamics, I think, over time.

If you look back at COVID, it was probably the only time in my career for a brief one, maybe 12-month period where digital health was cool, like non-healthcare tech, where you had My old firm, we were investors in Teladoc, and they came together in the mega merger with Livongo, and we're worth, I don't know, $70, $80 billion on paper one day, and now Teladoc's worth a couple billion again.

So there was a time where, and we had a couple liquidity events in that time, for instance, one medical we had invested in.

We got liquid within 15 months after a strategic investment, an investment that came along in one medical and went public.

So you're always trying to displace something or you're largely trying to displace something that's already, they're already doing.

So just the sales cycles and adoption cycles are more challenging, I think, in those end markets.

I think the self-insured employer space is one where if you go look at where some of the biggest growth companies have been, like Hinge Health, which is public now, Abada's in this category, Teladoc, Livongo in the days, a lot more enterprises.

The world is your oyster in terms of every enterprise can be a customer, so you have a different kind of growth trajectory you can get there.