The Haves & Have-Nots Of 2025 | Threshold Ventures Co-founder Emily Melton

This week for our 2025 recap, we’re joined by VC Emily Melton, co-founder of Threshold Ventures. Melton highlights her reflection of 2025, which splits the market into "haves and have-nots" with nothing in between, noting the concentration of venture dollars on "high flyers" and the indifference shown to established companies with respectable revenue.

We cover:

💸 The widening gap between the “haves” and “have-nots” in health tech

📉 The rise of recaps, down rounds, and investor “bargain-basement shopping”

🏥 Why healthcare’s 5.6-trillion-dollar cost structure can’t be fixed without technology

🧾 How policy incentives and private equity are reshaping M&A activity

💬 What founders need to prove to raise capital in today’s market

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About our guest: 

Emily is a co-founder of Threshold. She is looking for entrepreneurs who are genuinely excited about being agents of change and have an almost irrational drive to make things better. Her portfolio includes BetterUp, Brightline, Daero, Elation Health, Imagen, Livongo (NASDAQ: LVGO), Mendaera, ODAIA, Redfin (NASDAQ: RDFN), Tia, Transcarent, Verge Genomics, Videa, Vital, Viz, and Wellframe (acquired by HealthEdge).  Emily served as the chair of the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) board of directors for the 2022-23 term. She is also an active founding member of All Raise, a non-profit dedicated to improving access for women and others to start and invest in companies.    A Stanford grad with a BA in political philosophy with honors and an MBA, Emily is drawn to disruptive ideas and technologies that have the potential to radically change consumer, enterprise, and healthcare markets.

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The first trillion-dollar healthcare company, a $298M longevity round, and a telehealth CEO headed for federal sentencing. Last month had range.

Today on the show, Halle and Michael sort through the biggest December stories shaping the year ahead, from runaway longevity funding to a telehealth scandal headed for federal sentencing.

We cover:

🧬 Two hot funding rounds in longevity, including Function Health’s $298M B-round and Blueprint’s all-angel, no-VC $60M raise

💊 How Eli Lilly became the first trillion-dollar healthcare company

🏥 CVS’s $5.7B Oak Street Health write-down (and why most acquisitions fail)

🎓 Nursing, OT, PT, and PA being removed from the list of “professional” degrees by the Department of Education

🤖 OpenAI’s growing interest in consumer health tools

⚖️ The telehealth company whose founders were just convicted in one of the largest stimulant-fraud cases to date

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Show notes:

• Eli Lilly becomes first trillion-dollar healthcare company (Reuters)
• CVS takes $5.7B goodwill impairment on Oak Street Health (Forbes)
• Department of Education’s revised “professional degree” list (Newsweek)
• NYT: Patients turning to AI for support (Dagens.com)
• DOJ conviction of Done Global executives (DOJ)

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As millions of Americans hit the road to visit family for Thanksgiving, many will pass through, or return to, rural communities. Nearly 60 million Americans live in these areas, yet many struggle to access even basic healthcare as rural hospitals close at record rates.

Dr. Jennifer Schneider, co-founder and CEO of Homeward Health, is tackling this crisis head-on by reimagining how care is delivered to Medicare Advantage members in rural America. Drawing on her experiences as a physician, a patient with Type 1 diabetes, and the former president of Livongo, Jenny shares why rural healthcare is both a massive challenge and an untapped opportunity.

We cover:

🏥 Why rural Americans face dramatically higher mortality rates

💡 How Homeward is combining technology and on-the-ground care to serve overlooked communities

📉 What value-based care looks like outside major metro areas

🤝 Lessons from Castlight, Livongo, and building bilingual (tech + healthcare) teams

🔥 How Jenny’s personal experience with chronic illness shapes her leadership and vision

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About our guest: 

Dr. Jennifer Schneider is the co-founder and CEO of Homeward, where she is leading the transformation of rural healthcare through AI-enabled, value-based care delivery. A physician and technologist, Jennifer’s work is shaped by her experience growing up in a small town with type 1 diabetes—fueling her belief that geography should never determine access to care.

Previously, Jennifer was President and Chief Medical Officer at Livongo, where she helped scale the company through its IPO and led its $18.5B merger with Teladoc Health—the largest digital health transaction to date. She has also held executive roles at Castlight Health and began her career as a practicing internal medicine physician and health services researcher.

Jennifer serves on the boards of Vertex Pharmaceuticals and Maven Clinic, and has been named one of Modern Healthcare’s “100 Most Influential People in Healthcare.” She holds degrees from Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and the College of the Holy Cross.

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On the heels of raising $210 million at a $6 billion valuation, OpenEvidence is the fastest-growing physician app in history, now reaching over 40% of U.S. physicians and powering 17 million monthly clinical queries.

In this conversation, co-founder and CTO Zack Ziegler shares how his background in early large language models led him to build an AI that helps clinicians make better decisions at the point of care, without replacing their judgment.

We cover:

🧠 The strategies Open Evidence used to reach 40% of U.S. clinicians in a short time

💡 The unexpected reason they chose to go direct to doctors instead of via their employers

💰 How they make money

⚙️ What “Deep Consult” means for the future of clinical decision-making

🏥 Whether tools like this could ever—or should ever—be available to patients

About our guest: 

Zachary Ziegler is the cofounder and CTO of OpenEvidence, the leading medical information platform. Designed from the ground up for medical professionals, OpenEvidence organizes and expands the world's medical knowledge to make it more useful, open, accessible, and understandable. Launched out of the Mayo Clinic Platform Accelerate, OpenEvidence has become the most rapidly adopted tool by physicians in history, now used by over 40% of US physicians in over 15,000 care centers across the United States. Before founding OpenEvidence, Ziegler was a PhD student at Harvard University, where he worked with Professor Sasha Rush and was awarded the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. He completed his undergraduate studies at Cornell University, where he received the Barry Goldwater Scholarship.

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🙏Thank you to our show sponsor, LookDeep. LookDeep pioneers AI that can see, hear, and respond with care to help hospitals be Ever Present for Every Patient. Learn more at lookdeep.ai/aimee.

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A billion-dollar startup. A promise to change healthcare forever. And behind the scenes… a massive lie.

Tyler Shultz was just starting his career when he joined Theranos, only to discover that the company’s breakthrough blood tests didn’t actually work. Speaking up meant risking everything—his career, his family relationships, and his personal safety—but it also helped expose one of the biggest frauds in Silicon Valley history.

In this conversation, Tyler shares what it was really like inside Theranos, how he found the courage to blow the whistle, and what leaders today can learn about building ethical cultures that last.

We cover:

⚖️ What it was like working inside Theranos

💬 The one question he suggests job seekers ask potential employers

💡 What ethical leadership looks like when the pressure is on

🤨 His thoughts on Elizabeth Holmes’ new “blood testing” company

💰 Why rewarding whistleblowers might actually protect investors and patients

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About our guest: 

Tyler Shultz is a scientist at heart, a founder by nature, a whistleblower by accident, a speaker by day, a venture partner by night, and a dad 24/7. His professional life began by exposing unethical practices at Theranos, a revelation that led to the collapse of the $9 billion company and the criminal convictions of its CEO and COO. Since then, he has co-founded two diagnostics companies: a deep tech spinout from Stanford’s Center for Magnetic Nanotechnology and a direct-to-consumer diagnostics and telehealth company. Beyond building companies, Tyler advises startups and venture funds, helping them navigate the technical, commercial, and ethical challenges of scaling groundbreaking ideas. As a speaker, he shares his experiences with audiences worldwide, addressing lawyers, founders, executives, employees, students, investors, board members, regulators, and compliance experts. He explores themes of truth, courage, and integrity, demonstrating how ethical decision-making can be a competitive advantage.

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Does it feel like we packed in a decade of progress this year in digital health? We think so. 

Today, Halle and Steve break down the biggest digital health stories of the moment, from funding trends to AI rivalries and new rules shaping the future of care.

We cover:

💸 What non-AI healthcare startups should do in today’s AI-obsessed investor market

🧠 Is there room for more than one winner in clinical decision support tools?

⚖️ California’s new chatbot law

🩺 Why UnitedHealthcare just paid $9B to AARP despite Medicare Advantage headwinds

🌡️ Hims’ expansion into menopause care and what it means for vertical startups

🤖 How Mass General Brigham is using AI to ease doctor shortages

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Show notes:

• The Future of Healthtech 2025 (SVB)
• 2025: The State of AI in Healthcare (Menlo Ventures)
• Q3 2025 market overview: Signals out of sync (Rock Health)
• OpenEvidence scores $200M, 3 months after series B, boosting valuation to $6B (Fierce Healthcare)
• Wolters Kluwer’s new UpToDate Expert AI (Wolters Kluwer)
• New California ‘Companion Chatbot’ Law Imposes Disclosure, Safety Protocol and Annual Reporting Requirements (Skadden)
• UnitedHealth Group, AARP Extend Medicare Partnership Beyond 2025 (Forbes)
• Hims & Hers to Offer Treatments for Menopause (WSJ)
• One Mass. health system is turning to AI to ease shortage of primary care doctors. Some don’t like it (STAT)

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Over 3 million clinicians around the world depend on UpToDate to guide patient care, and now the gold standard in clinical decision support is integrating generative AI. But in a world where AI models often hallucinate, how do you build something that doctors can actually trust?

In this episode, Halle talks with Dr. Holly Urban, VP of Business Development and Strategy at Wolters Kluwer Health, about UpToDate Expert AI, a new tool trained exclusively on UpToDate’s physician-authored content — not the open internet — and what it means for the future of medicine.

We cover:

🤖 Why grounding AI in verified medical data matters for accuracy and trust

💬 How clinicians are using AI at the point of care today, and where they’re facing fatigue

📚 How medical education will evolve when memorization matters less than critical thinking

💡 Why patient-facing AI tools could help close the information gap between doctors and patients

🚨 The biggest risks Holly sees ahead for AI in healthcare

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About our guest: 

Holly Urban, MD, MBA has extensive experience in healthcare technology and believes in the power of evidence-based content to transform EHRs beyond transactional systems into tools that allow clinicians to provide improved patient outcomes. After practicing as a primary care pediatrician, Dr. Urban worked for several EHR technology and evidence-based content companies, and has served in healthcare IT leadership roles for over fifteen years. Before joining Wolters Kluwer Health, she served as CMIO at Oracle Cerner, Director of Product Management at MCG Health, and VP of Product Management at McKesson Horizon Clinicals.

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Show Notes:

• AI in UpToDate: New Generative solutions for Medical Professionals
• AI hallucinates more frequently as it gets more advanced — is there any way to stop it from happening, and should we even try? (LiveScience)
• Technology and healthcare costs (Annals of Pediatric Cardiology)

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Most people spend over 30 hours a year dealing with customer service—on hold, repeating account numbers, and navigating endless phone trees. But what if AI could fix that without losing the human touch?

Clay Bavor, co-founder of Sierra (now valued at $10B) and former VP at Google, joins us to explore how AI agents are reshaping how companies interact with customers and what that means for the most complex service industry in the world: healthcare.

We cover:

🧠 The difference between horizontal and. vertical AI solutions

⚙️ If systems of action will take over systems of record (like Epic) in enterprise AI

🫀 How empathy, tone, and even “voice sommeliers” help AI sound more human

📉 The risks of AI job displacement (and the new roles emerging in its wake)

🚀 Clay’s take on staying grounded as a unicorn entrepreneur when hype runs high in Silicon Valley

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About our guest: 

Clay Bavor is a co-founder of Sierra, which helps businesses build better, more human customer experiences with AI. A visionary product leader and technologist, Clay spent 18 years at Google, where he spearheaded some of the company’s most innovative efforts. As head of Google Labs, he led teams working on forward-looking projects, including augmented and virtual reality, Project Starline, and Google Lens. Earlier, Clay oversaw the product and design teams for Gmail, Google Docs, Google Drive, and Google Apps for Enterprise (now Workspace), shaping tools used by billions worldwide. He also contributed to foundational Google products, including Search and advertising technologies.

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This milestone 200th(!!!) episode of The Heart of Healthcare Podcast features none other than Dr. Tom X. Lee, the serial physician-founder behind Epocrates (acquired for $293M), One Medical (acquired by Amazon for $3.9B), and now Galileo, a tech-enabled medical group aiming to rewire care delivery from the ground up.

We cover:

🧠 Why most doctors aren’t wired for management (and what traits he thinks translate to startup success)

📉 How medical education is falling behind the pace of change in care delivery

💸 Why healthcare’s biggest barrier is economics, not culture

🏥 What Galileo is doing differently to re-engineer care on the backend

📈 What founders need to understand about building for exit vs. impact

About our guest: 

Tom is the CEO and visionary behind Galileo. Prior to Galileo, Tom helped build One Medical into the leading independent primary care system in the country, and previously helped launch Epocrates, the #1 mobile app used by clinicians at the point of care. Tom is a board-certified internist who completed training at Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He received his BS from Yale University, his MD from the University of Washington School of Medicine, and his MBA from Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business.

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Happy Q4 Heart of Healthcare Listeners! We’re back with your monthly Digital Health Download, where we discuss the biggest industry headlines of the month. 

We cover: 

💊 Pharm tariffs, D2C drug ads, and TrumpRx? 

📉 The ACA tax credit standoff and how it could double premiums for millions 

🛒 UnitedHealthcare’s new storefront and what it signals about point solution fatigue

📈 The GLP-1 gold rush: Remedy’s $450M revenue, Virta’s $160M, and FDA’s warning shot 

⚖️ The Doximity vs. Open Evidence lawsuit that could define AI IP 

🤰 The acetaminophen-autism debate and why pregnant women deserve better data

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Show notes:

• Virtual GLP-1 startups: Pill mills or the future of obesity care? (Halle Tecco)
• TrumpRx: A Prescription for Political Theater (Drugstore Cowboy)
• The future of metabolic health and weight loss drugs: Projecting mortality reductions in the US and UK populations (Swiss Re)
• The Latest in Maternal Health Fear Mongering? Tylenol (Vogue)

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🙏 Thank you to our show sponsor, LookDeep. LookDeep pioneers AI that can see, hear, and respond with care to help hospitals be Ever Present for Every Patient. Learn more at lookdeep.ai/aimee. 

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