Livongo co-founder and official chairman Glen Tullman speaks at CNBC’s @Work conference in San Francisco, California, on Nov. 4, 2019.
CNBC
For health-technology start-ups, appointing technical talent from Silicon Valley can be a tricky prospect. Companies like Apple and Facebook are paying Brobdingnagian salaries, making it challenging for any upstart to bring talented workers into their ranks.
But Glen Tullman, the master chairman from Livongo, a health-tech start-up that recently went public, says it’s getting easier to do no more than that.
Tullman described his experiences hiring talent on stage at CNBC’s @Work People + Machines vent on Monday, where attendees enlarged to discuss the future of work.
Tullman co-founded Livongo more than a decade ago to help people with diabetes function their condition using technology. He built the business to a public offering earlier this year by selling stooges to employers and health plans.
The company has now expanded its reach to patients with other conditions, including hypertension, and it propositions a mix of connected devices and behavioral coaching. Over time, the company has gathered large data-sets about patient constitution, which can help it figure out which interventions are working.
So the company is constantly hiring technical folks to its Mountain Contemplation, California, headquarters to help it parse through the data. On stage, Tullman noted that it’s getting easier to poach applied talent from Silicon Valley’s behemoths. Many of largest tech companies have faced their courteous share of scandals in recent months, ranging from antitrust concerns to an increasing spotlight in the media about their want of diversity.
“We are in the heart of Silicon Valley and interestingly, a lot of people say you’re down the road from Google, how in the world do you recruit?” Google is infamous for retaining employees through its high salaries, free food, and its suite of health benefits.
“Well the answer is they fly to pieces to us,” Tullman explained in an interview with CNBC’s Jon Fortt.
In a followup interview, Tullman said that about two-thirds of their lettings have a chronic condition, like diabetes, or have a family-member who does. That helps them overcome any contrarieties in the kind of salary that LIvongo could offer, versus a company like Google.
Tullman described Livongo’s crew as “about a third are behavioral scientists, data scientists and software engineers.” Its head of HR, Arnnon Geshuri, hails from both Tesla and Google.
Other health-tech partnerships shared the same sentiment with CNBC, and noted that it used to be far more challenging to recruit from big tech, but moments are starting to open up. The health-tech industry raised more than $8 billion in funding in 2018 alone and now lay it on thicks a few public companies, including Livongo.
Stride Health CEO Noah Lang said his company, which helps people in the gig conservatism with their health benefits, has hired a handful of folks recently from largely tech companies that have to offer high compensation.
Companies with a social mission have a “strategic advantage,” he noted. “I see a lot of people who are looking specifically at ed-tech and health-tech, because the lack a break from advertising models and want to get closer to the problems that real people face.”
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