TELEHEALTH

Men won't go to a doctor for hair loss. They just won't. So we brought the doctor to their phone. Vanity is a powerful motivator when you remove the embarrassment.

The hardest part wasn't building the product. It was convincing people that a telehealth company selling ED pills was a legitimate healthcare business. It is. The results prove it.

Everyone said we were just a hair loss company. Then we added skincare. Then mental health. Then sexual health for women. Now we have 1.5 million subscribers. Still just a hair loss company?

Hims is a brand. We're infrastructure. They sell you a product. We connect you to a doctor, write the prescription, fill it in our pharmacy, and deliver it to your door. That's a fundamentally different business.

We started as Roman — men's health. ED medication online. Everyone thought it was a joke. Then we did $100 million in revenue and suddenly nobody was laughing.

We hit a $7 billion valuation. For a telehealth company that started selling ED pills. If you told investors that pitch in 2016, they would have walked out. But the numbers don't lie. And neither does the demand.

Texans fought us in court for years. The Texas Medical Board tried to ban telehealth entirely. We won. In court. Against the state of Texas. That legal fight defined the industry.

I founded Teladoc in 2002. Nobody wanted telehealth. Doctors hated it. Insurers ignored it. Patients didn't trust it. It took a global pandemic to prove what I knew 18 years earlier.

We serve 80 million members in 130 countries. The largest telehealth company on earth. The stock is down 90%. Revenue is still growing. The business is fine. The stock price is a different conversation.

COVID gave us 10 years of growth in 10 weeks. We went from 2 million visits a year to 2 million visits a quarter. Overnight, every doctor in America became a telehealth doctor. Whether they liked it or not.

Telehealth can expand access. It can also expand risk. We should have been more careful about controlled substances.

Every doctor visit that doesn't require touching the patient should be virtual. That's still true.

Health tech during COVID went from nice-to-have to essential. Nurx and telehealth proved that access to care shouldn’t require a waiting room.