Teladoc Founder Michael Gorton on the Early Days of Pioneering the Telemedicine Category (And What’s He’s Up to Next)

In 2002, Michael Gorton founded Teladoc — the telemedicine company with a current market cap of over $6 billion. 

Like all truly game-changing innovations, Michael and his team had to overcome tremendous resistance and opposition in the early days of taking their idea to market. 

From being raided by the DEA to being threatened with prison time, it would have been easy for any founder to back down and pursue a less risky idea. But Michael wasn't one to back down from a challenge so, he dug in and executed a thought leadership strategy and invested heavily into educating doctors, patients, and most importantly — regulators. These efforts played a major role in the growth of the category over the past 20 years. 

Michael is a true pioneer of the telemedicine category. While someone else may have initially invented it (which he discusses in this episode), Teladoc did go on to dominate it.  He was on the front lines of getting the world to believe in the idea and on today’s episode, he’ll walk us through lessons learned along the way before letting us know what he’s currently working on [Hint: it’s incredibly exciting]. 

Topics discussed:

• Michael’s background and the origins of his career in telemedicine 
• The early days of Teladoc 
• Paving the way to telemedicine and overcoming the legal challenges and resistance from those who were against changing the status quo.  
• The evolution of telemedicine since its conception almost 20 years ago 
• Why thought leadership was so critical to Teladocs success 
• How to succeed in creating a new market category 
• About Recuro health and how the company will transform the future of healthcare