Russell Glass: Why AI Will Transform Healthcare Forever | The Further, Faster Podcast

Russell Glass (0:00)

I don't think AI-enabled health care goes anywhere but bigger and bigger over time.

SPEAKER_2 (0:12)

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Bob Rosin (0:31)

Welcome to The Further, Faster Podcast. I'm Bob Rosin, Managing Partner at Antler in the US. And I'm very excited today to have our guest, Russell Glass, with me today.

We used to work together for quite some time together at LinkedIn, but Russell has an incredible story around his journey in entrepreneurship and also what's happening now in healthcare with AI. And right now, we're seeing tremendous advancements in healthcare in a number of areas that we want to get into and talk more about with Russ. But maybe before we kind of get inside a bit more on Russ, so Russ started in marketing and built a business called Bizo that we acquired when I was at LinkedIn and had the opportunity to work together here in San Francisco. And then you led the marketing solutions business at LinkedIn, which was one of the core businesses at LinkedIn. You built it to over $800 million in revenue during your tenure. And then now LinkedIn is doing over $20 billion a year in revenue. The largest business is that business that you laid the foundations for. So I'm very excited to hear more of that story if you're open to it. But you kind of want to get into what happened after that, where after LinkedIn was acquired by Microsoft and you moved on, you started a company called Ginger, which you ended up merging with Headspace, became a real juggernaut in kind of mental wellness. And you were CEO there. And you've raised over $300 million in capital, have done M&A, creating more than a billion dollars in exit value, backed more than 30 companies at Seed, and now run a venture capital firm called Arteria Capital and focused on AI and healthcare. So I'm really excited, Russ, for you to be with us today. And let's talk about AI and healthcare. But maybe, again, before we get into kind of what's happening in healthcare space, a bit more on your personal journey. You know, we met when you were doing Bizo.

I think, you know, you have been before that kind of at Zoom Info, and you're working kind of on marketing products and kind of what was the inspiration for you to start a company in the first place? I know a lot of people that listen to this podcast are, you know, entrepreneurs or potential founders are thinking about starting something. So maybe take us back to those days you were at Zoom Info. Like, what inspired you to go off and do something on your own?

Russell Glass (2:44)

Yeah.

Well, first of all, this is a ton of fun. Thanks for having me, our first podcast. This is a big deal.

Bob Rosin (2:51)

That's right.

Russell Glass (2:54)

Yeah. I mean, so I'm one of those. I've always been entrepreneurial. I started my first company when I was 13

It was a tennis racket stringing business.

Bob Rosin (3:04)

Oh yeah?

Russell Glass (3:05)

Had a couple of companies at Duke that I ran.

So it's always been my journey. I think probably because my dad was an entrepreneur, he's a textile entrepreneur. So it was in my day-to-day growing up, and I've just always loved the notion that you can solve problems and build organizations around it and scale them. And so I was always going to start companies. Bizo specifically really came out of, so Zoom Info, really interesting company doing semantic search.

Before that was really a thing, it was organizing unstructured information from around the web and turning it into canonical content like business profiles. Really some of the early technologies that led to LLMs and led to us being able to do this at a totally different level. But I was the first product and marketing leader there at the time. And I was frustrated that email was the only way I could target my buyers at scale. So I'm trying to scale up this business, and there were marketing automation platforms and whatever else, and I was targeting them, but all the innovation was happening on the consumer side. And I started to think about, what would I want as a B2B marketer that's trying to target business people? And that led to Bizo. It was basically a company I built to solve the problems I had as a B2B marketer, and it turned into a great ride, and ultimately ended up in LinkedIn buying us six years later.